Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

I want Carl Sagan to explain the sky to me.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

Listen! If stars are lit It means there is someone who needs it, It means someone wants them to be, That someone deems those specks of spit Magnificent!

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

Look up at the stars and you're gone.

Stars in the night,' he said. 'Something something something something, some delight

If I didn't choose art, I would have become an astronomer.

I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

Books are better than movies because you design the set the way you want it to look.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

The night sky in Egypt is a swirling mass of stars so bright and numerous the sky seems to tremble with the ice-blue weight of them.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I think that all great art never strives to answer any questions; it just asks the appropriate ones at the appropriate time.

The great thing about books is that you can end with a question mark.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Art is more engaging that propaganda.