Rebecca Solnit Quotes

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

I think people are particularly interested to see who the real me is, but... different stories call for different approaches and you change based on the experience you want that person to have.

There is only one type of story in the world-your story.

No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.

All autobiography is fiction.

Time is a wonderful storyteller.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

The past is our very being.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

History is written backwards but lived forwards.

Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more. It is living in ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison. In fact it is us. Memory creates the knot, the complex called the I and the ego

We all remember things, it's what we remember that determines how we live.

I think, for me, I have to remember that I'm telling a story in some way.

I knew that I had to write my memoirs.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

There's nothing particularly unique about my experiences except that they're my experiences.