Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.
Interpretation
Desiring transformation can change our understanding of life, which involves both risk and growth.
Rebecca Solnit suggests that our desires for personal transformation are profound and often lead us into the unknown. The risk of losing oneself in the process is part of truly living, as it implies embracing uncertainty and change, rather than clinging to a static existence.
In practice
Using this quote in a motivational speech about personal development and embracing life's challenges.
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.
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.
Each of your breaths is a priceless jewel, since each of them is irreplaceable and once gone, can never be retrieved.
From religion comes a man's purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.
I'm sure I would still have anxiety even if I got a bunch of surgery, and was the most conventionally attractive, cis-passing woman in the world; I think those are traumas that never go away.
I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living. But living an honest life - for that you need the truth.
Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.
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