I Love Rebecca Solnit's Writing

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

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.
― 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

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking