Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?
I am against resources being controlled by corporations, but that doesn't mean I want them controlled by the state.
To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.
I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
I don't think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it's loved by enough people that I'm grateful and able to keep going.
A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.
We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.
No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.
Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.
Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to adapt to.
A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.
Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.
Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.'
To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.
Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
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.
As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.
Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.
Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.
The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully.
....there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints.
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.
That's what I'm trying to get over: the idea that anarchism offers a description of equitable relations that go way back rather than a hypothesis of what the future should look like.
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.
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.
I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.