Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of mutual assistance and building community in times of crisis.
Rebecca Solnit highlights the innate human tendency to support one another in difficult situations. She underscores the actions taken by people to create safety, provide resources, and foster connections within their communities, illustrating a collective resilience and the profound impact of empathy and cooperation in the face of adversity.
Themes
CommunitySupportResilienceCooperationHelping
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during community service events to inspire volunteers.
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.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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
Similar quotes
The Universe is circles within circles, and everything is one circle, and all the circles are connected to each other. Each family is a circle, and those family circles connect together and make a community, and the community makes its circle where it lives on the Earth. It (the community) cares for that part (of the Earth) but cares for it as a circle - which is to say in a cooperative and egalitarian way, where everybody is cared for, and everybody is respected.
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Citizen service is the very American idea that we meet our challenges not as isolated individuals but as members of a true community, with all of us working together. Our mission is nothing less than to spark a renewed sense of obligation, a new sense of duty, a new season of service.
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We need a new kind of citizenship, so that we can see citizens as themselves earning the rank of patriot because of their involvement in their community affairs....We as a society need to be encouraging people to focus not just on individual wants but on serving the larger community.
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We see community organizations as major service providers and economic drivers rather than as recipients or distributors of charity, and coordinators of volunteers. Today they constitute what's referred to as 'the social economy'.
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Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.
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Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement
Robert D. PutnamRead