Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Rebecca Solnit
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”
“For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.”
“Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.”
“The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”
“A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.”
“A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.”
“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.”
“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.”
“Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.”
“Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.”
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Book Keywords:
errand, possiblity, cities, italy, story, epiphany, landscape, journey, freedom, walking, page-171, page-178, jane-austen, page-100, alienation, maps, architecture, path, urban-planning, language, street, labyrinth, magic
