from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
Perhaps it's that you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.
from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit Exceptional beauty and charm are among those gifts given by the sinister fairy at the christening. They give the bearer considerable sway over others, which can keep them so busy being a sort of siren on the rocks where others shipwreck that they forget that they themselves need to figure out where they are going.
from Abandon, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.
from The Blue of Distance, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit He peers down one narrow corridor between those rows of cages, and hundreds of white heads with floppy red combs lean out to peer back at him. A single egg drops to the floor of one cage, rolls forward gently through a low slit, and comes to rest in a trough. All right, who was that?
from "The Dope On Eggs: Anisogamy, Science Journalism, and Other Food for Thought" in The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder by David Quammen |
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