Rebecca Solnit

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.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to deconstruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
-Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
-Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

Home is everything you can walk to.
-Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics