Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the power of imagination and the pursuit of dreams, even in challenging circumstances.
Rebecca Solnitβs quote highlights the transformative power of dreaming and imagination. It suggests that despite the darkness and challenges we face, we have the capacity to soar, to achieve our dreams, and to experience the beauty of life in small, meaningful ways. The imagery of 'devouring heaven in bites too small to be measured' emphasizes that even these minor experiences can be profound and enriching.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom. Of course the task will not be easy. But not to do this would be a crime against humanity, against which I ask all humanity now to rise up.
I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.
It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.
Here above the farms and ranches of the Great Plains aviation lives up to the promise that inspired dreamers through the ages. Here you are truly separate from the earth, at least for a little while, removed from the cares and concerns that occupy you on the ground. This separation from the earth is more than symbolic, more than a physical removal - it has an emotional dimension as tangible as the wood, fabric, and steel that has transported you aloft.
When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don't actually believe makes sense. We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do.
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