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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
TransformationDesireChangeLifeGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a motivational speech about personal development and embracing life's challenges.
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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