Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Maturity allows us to reconcile sorrow and beauty, offering a deeper appreciation for life's complexities.
In this quote, Rebecca Solnit suggests that true maturity involves embracing the duality of sorrow and beauty. Rather than seeing these emotions as oppositional forces, maturity enables individuals to perceive them as interconnected aspects of life, leading to an enriched aesthetic appreciation that finds solace and beauty in the inevitable losses that time brings.
Themes
MaturitySorrowBeautyAestheticLoss
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a discussion about the impact of life experiences on personal growth.
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes βI 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.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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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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
We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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