Rebecca Solnit Journey Quotations

A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.

The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.