Rebecca Solnit Quotes

I'm having this conversation with you now. I'm talking, but I'm thinking, feeling, smelling, and moving. Yet I'm concentrating on what you're saying. So that means there's more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person's got you doing.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

If you want to know if your brain is flabby, feel your legs.

For, as I think I have said, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

Think with your whole body.

When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

If I could do anything in my life and be remembered for anything, I would like to be remembered for helping the world see the value of physical engagement with ideas.

I do Hatha yoga at Yogaworks three times a week and do two hikes a week.

I love exercise. I hike, do yoga.

When I dance, I picture myself and the floor in my head.

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

I can remember walking as a child. It was not customary to say you were fatigued. It was customary to complete the goal of the expedition.

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.

After a day's walk everything has twice its usual value.

In its outward manifestation, meditation appears to involve either stopping, by parking the body in a stillness that suspends activity, or giving oneself over to flowing movement. In either case, it is an embodiment of wise attention, an inward gesture undertaken for the most part in silence, a shift from doing to simply being. It is an act that may at first seem artificial but that we soon discover, if we keep at it, is ultimately one of pure love for the life unfolding within us and around us.

the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.

I think, as human beings, we at times overvalue the intellect and we undermine the body. I don't mean a body externally and the shape of a body. I mean the intelligence of a body, the memories that a body can store, how a body feels emotion, and how a body processes emotion.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

It seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

Ironically, we are all too often educated out of rather than in to an awareness of the body.

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.