Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the deep relationship between humans and animals, highlighting their role in our thoughts and imagination.
Rebecca Solnit's quote emphasizes the significant impact animals have on human creativity and thought processes. By describing animals as 'beasts of burden' carrying our thoughts, she suggests that their absence would silence a vital expression of imagination and emotional language that connects us to our world and each other.
Themes
AnimalsImaginationThoughtsConnectionSilence
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about environmental conservation, one could quote Solnit to highlight the importance of animals in our creative lives.
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes →I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
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We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
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If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
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The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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