Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Revolutions bring about a mix of emotions and experiences, similar to the changing seasons.
Rebecca Solnit compares revolution to the season of spring, highlighting how both are characterized by a sense of renewal and hope. Just as spring brings buds and showers, reflecting growth and potential, revolutions embody qualities like bravery and solidarity, but these feelings are often temporary, reminding us that both revolutions and seasons are phases that can change over time.
Themes
RevolutionChangeHopeBraverySolidarity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about social change.
More from Rebecca Solnit
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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.
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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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