Rebecca Solnit: That Center Called Love

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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