Rebecca Solnit Quotes

A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.

Anyone who has ever asked for directions knows you need two crucial pieces of information to get good results: a starting point and a destination.

If you want to go east, don't go west.

It's impossible to map out a route to your destination if you don't know where you're starting from.

With a labyrinth, you make a choice to go in - and once you've chosen, around and around you go. But you always find your way to the center.

There are no signposts in the sea.

When I got to Chicago I had to find my way.

I know how to find my way into the takedown.

I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.

I am the Walker and the Maze.

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.

I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

The first path a human being ever travels is the path that leads out of the maternal womb. Every human being's first labyrinth is that of a woman.

I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads

A map is not a journey.

Searching and the route we take are more important than making a find.

It's like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all's well. You get off it and the next thing you know you're lost if you're not lucky.

Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.

I followed those highway signs and I've run down those thin white lines.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

Fate never promises to tell you everything up front. You aren't always shown the path in life you're supposed to take. But if there was one thing she'd learned in the past few weeks, it was that sometimes, when you're really lucky, you meet someone with a map.