{"author":"Rebecca Solnit","author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit","total_quotes":194,"quotes":[{"text":"How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["art","life-lessons","movies","understanding"],"id":739,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["art","letting-go","loss"],"id":1596,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["activism","hope","politics"],"id":1994,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["memory"],"id":3234,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["art","creativity","self-improvement","work"],"id":6963,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["essays","feminism"],"id":8264,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["reading","writing"],"id":12736,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["blue","golden-gate-bridge","longing","mount-tamalpais","san-francisco","travel","wanderlust"],"id":13064,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["perspective"],"id":13745,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"},{"text":"Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["coherence","comfort","fear","story","unknown"],"id":16743,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":194,"pages":20,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}