Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Walking connects us physically to the world around us and helps us understand our place in it.
In this quote, Rebecca Solnit emphasizes the importance of walking as a fundamental human activity that allows us to engage with our environment. It suggests that through walking, our bodies interact with the earth, providing a sense of scale and grounding that shapes our understanding of ourselves within the natural world.
Themes
WalkingNatureBodyEarthMeasurement
In practice
Example use cases
During a nature walk with friends, you might share this quote to reflect on the experience.
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes βI 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.
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We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
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If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
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The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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 SolnitRead
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