Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnitis an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 June 1961
CountryUnited States of America
time war fighting
Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.
dream heaven darkness
We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
garden landscape painting
All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.
fighting space imagination
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.
culture sometimes wonder
I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?
art imagination empathy
A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
powerful war way
It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
world arms mystery
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
fossils different himalayas
There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.
thinking world safe
I STILL THINK THE REVOLUTION IS TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR POETRY, MEANDERING, FOR THE FRAIL AND VULNERABLE, THE RARE AND OBSCURE, THE IMPRACTICAL AND LOCAL AND SMALL.
decay transformation process
The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
cities way limits
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
writing black-and-white shade
There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.
stars reading sky
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.