Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of creating a world that nurtures creativity and sensitivity.
Rebecca Solnit's quote captures the idea of a revolution that prioritizes the delicate and often overlooked aspects of life, such as poetry and vulnerability. It advocates for a society where the arts and the seemingly impractical are valued and protected, suggesting that a truly humane world is one that embraces the fragile, rare, and local elements that contribute to our humanity.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop, I shared a quote by Rebecca Solnit to inspire participants to embrace their unique voices.
Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
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.
We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
I want people to come to me open and vulnerable. When they come to the gallery, they have to leave their watches, their computers, their Blackberrys, iPads, iPhones, because we are so incredibly used to technology, and I wanted to remove that.
I hope that there are many more women out there writing bits of feminist sci-fi. And men, also - men are allowed to write feminist things.
After 58 years you'd think writing would get easier. It doesn't. If you're lucky, you become harder to please. That's all right, it's still a pleasure.
So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.
You are either born a writer or you are not.
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