We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.
Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.
You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found...
The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.
I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.
Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.
Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity – culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.
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.
The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.
Space – as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience – has vanished.
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
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.
We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.