top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know."
Standard
Customized
Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit
"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
"It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after."
"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."
"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."
"Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on."
"Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge."
"Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - for wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space."
"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone."
Exlpore more Reflection quotes
"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"
"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."
"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."
"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"
"Find time to admire and appreciate the glittering lights on snowflakes."
"Always account for each unit of passing time."
"To reflect God's image is a lifestyle."
"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."
bottom of page