Rebecca Solnit Quotes

If you knew me in the past, please do not think that I am the same person that you are meeting today. I have experienced more of life, I have encountered new depths in those I love, I have suffered and prayed and I am different.

The solution begins with a deeper transformation that must occur in each of us. I AM isn’t as much about what you can do, as who you can be. And from that transformation of being, action will naturally follow.

The truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

I love people who really turn their lives around. I think it's such a wonderful human trait.

Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That's what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel - and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside.

Nothing happens without personal transformation.

Is sobriety all that we are to expect of a spiritual awakening? No, sobriety is only a bare beginning; it is only the first gift of the first awakening. If more gifts are to be received, our awakening has to go on. As it does go on, we find that bit by bit we can discard the old life - the one that did not work - for a new life that can and does work under any conditions whatever.

The spiritual journey has to do with learning to think more deeply and take as long a time as we need. That's the path to wisdom.

The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.

people in great trouble don't change to other people. They only change to themselves.

Growth is a detox process, as our weakest, darkest places are sucked up to the surface in order to be released...often, it is not a change in partners but rather a change in perception that delivers us to the love we seek.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree.

When you start to crack open, don't waste a moment gathering your old self up into something like you knew before. Let your new self splash like sunlight into every dark place and laugh and cry and make sounds you never made & thank all that is holy for the gift.

You can't find that moment when you became somebody else, because everything is in flux. So as it were, the torturous period where you are changing, you are transforming - I think that can be very hard on somebody's system. You don't necessarily realize that is what's happening.

Jon passes from Darkness to Light.

You happened to me,You scare me to death, you know. When you stormed into my life, you turned everything inside out. You upset all the things I believed about myself and made me think in new ways. I know who I used to be, but I’m finally ready to figure out who I am. Cynicism gets tiring, Isabel, and you’ve . . . rested me.And don’t you dare tell me you’ve stopped loving me back, because you’re still a better person than I am, and I’m counting on you to take more care with my heart than I took with yours.

Love is a great master. It teaches us to be what we never were.

When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.

You changed my life. You changed my ways. I don't even recognize myself these days. It must be a reflection of you, only you.

It's that transformative nature of love and music and yoga that really inspires me.

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.