Rebecca Solnit Quotes

If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

So many times, we take things to heart and that eats us up, and we think it over and over again with work and our personal life. But most of the time, it is not personal. It may have nothing to do with you but, instead, what the other person is going through in their life.

God defend me from myself.

I nod, because I do understand. I'm just not sure how to go about divorcing myself from the evil I've already accepted.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.

It's wonderful to have the most important thing in the world there first thing in the morning. And especially in this business, where the opportunity to think everything is about you is there every day, now I really know that it isn't all about me.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.

Attack thoughts towards others are attack thoughts towards ourselves.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

I turned myself to face me, but I've never caught a glimpse of how the others must see the faker.

There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I'm the biggest sinner of them all.

It's amazing to me in retrospect that I wrote as much as I did with full-time jobs. Each city gave me a new distance from - and a new way of looking at - India. I'm grateful for the movement. I feel as if I've crammed several lives into one.

It is the evening that questions thus from within me.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.

When I lost my way, and When the road was too long, I was muttering to myself. Life is just that way.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.

I've sort of prided myself on playing characters with conscience. The first way I go about creating a character is looking at that area of conscience. What have they done, and what has it cost.