Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Nigeria has had the misfortune - no, the fortune - of seeing the worst face of capitalism anywhere in Africa. The masses have seen it, they are disgusted, and they want an alternative.

If you desire something, you don't have it. It is more interesting than enjoyment, because enjoyment erases the mysteries and the vision of desire. Desire opens up possibilities but never achieves anything, whereas enjoyment is just the brutal achievement of something - and after that, it's done.

Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.

In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.

Is it that Nature, attentive to the preservation of mankind, increases our wishes to live, while she lessens our enjoyments, and as she robs the senses of every pleasure, equips imag-ination in the spoil?

I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards [...] and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.

Disneyland is not just another amusement park. It's unique, and I want it kept that way. Besides, you don't work for a dollar - you work to create and have fun.

I wish my shadow would get up and walk beside me.

Oh, yes, that feels so good," I moaned, and instead of punching Ian, pulled him closer. Breath tickled my neck as he laughed. "I know. I'm truly gifted.

Imagination consists in expelling from reality several incomplete persons, and then using the magic and subversive powers of desire to bring them back in the form of one entirely satisfying presence.

The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

I'm always sort of looking for projects that I can sort of put out into the world, into the public sphere, and to somehow cause an effect. I want to be able to create projects that sort of are going to make people think and think in this sort of magical, sort of fantastical way.

...Everything that is, desires to be. As we act, we unfold our being. Enjoyment naturally follows, for a thing desired always brings delight.

We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

The United Nations has long recognised that the imagination, ideals and energies of young men and women are vital for the continuing development of the societies in which they live. And since its inception in 1948, AIESEC has contributed to this development by serving as an agent of positive change trough education and cultural exchange.

You need everyone to get together and just believe in it, and lead by example that it is possible to be outside the system, and that's really super-f - king hard, and I'm sure there's some geniuses out there who can achieve it.

The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

I've lived long enough to see the triumph of zealots and absolutists, to watch money swallow politics, to witness the rise of the corporate state. See the party of working and poor people become a sycophant of crony capitalism. Watch the union of church and state become fashionable again. Witness the coupling of news and entertainment. See everyday people cast overboard as the pirates and predators of Wall Street seized the ship of state. I didn't drift; I moved left just by standing still.

Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.

We must regain our vision and hope and move our country forward on an agenda of peace and justice.

...and best of all, the wilderness of books, in which she could wander, where she liked, made the library a region of bliss to her.

Fidel Castro gave it all to make his nation serviceable to all who desire real change. That's why I love Fidel Castro, and that's why he will never die.

No fantasies, I don't think. Most of my fantasies have already been realized.

the main necessity on both sides of a revolution is kindness, which makes possible the most surprising things. To treat one's neighbor as oneself is the fundamental maxim for revolution.

Pain or pleasure? I say pleasure.