If you’re looking for the best The Faraway Nearby quotes you’ve come to the right place. We compiled a list of 31 quotes that best summarise the message of Rebecca Solnit in The Faraway Nearby. Let these quotes inspire you!
The Faraway Nearby Quotes
The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don’t change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it’s that of a nation or a single human being.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
I’d wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I’d moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren’t done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
The self is…a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we’re taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it’s home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, “Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self, ” but empathy, solidarity, allegiance–the nerves that run out into the world–expand the self beyond its physical bounds.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
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.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we’re connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that’s acceptance.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it’s something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
The coolness of Buddhism isn’t indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
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.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
When you are well, your own body is a sealed country into which you need not explore far, but when you are unwell, there is no denying that you are made up of organs and fluids and chemistry and that the mechanisms by which your body operates are not invincible.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
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
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
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.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish