Rebecca Solnit Quotes

EXPLORING the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

It was not until I was in my forties, in the fifth decade of my life, that the sense of place, the spirit of place, became of paramount importance to me. It was then that I began my travels, that I discovered, through photography, the quality of light, and that I gradually became able to paint the mood of place.

I am happy to continue with my journey through time.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

For me, my travels have been the chance to go to a place that already exists in my imagination.

I guess I can go anywhere I want. If only I knew where to go.

I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure.

In 1994, after four years of talking about travel on my first show, I realized I knew so little about the world - I knew so little about myself. I decided to quit my job and pursue a postgraduate degree in New York.

Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.

I've been things and seen places.

Journey is my life now.

I always take D.C. with me. And I always come back home.

I definitely associate songs with the places that I've been.

I love to go on road trips. That's one thing I love about being in L.A. and having a car. In New York, you can get around on the subway but you can't really go anywhere. But there's a danger in believing that where you are defines you.

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t much matter whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.

If you're any kind of artist, you've got to ... keep opening yourself to new possibilities.

I have always had a love for American geography, and especially for the landscapes of the South. One of my pleasures has been to drive across it, with no one in the world knowing where I am, languidly absorbing the thoughts and memories of old moments, of people vanished now from my life.

By walking, I found out where I was going.

When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.

He must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day's agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.

Travel gives a character of experience to our knowledge, and brings the figures on the tablet of memory into strong relief.

travel is compost for the mind

Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves