Rachel Peterson

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Rachel.


Loading...
Rebecca Solnit
“We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.”
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

John Steinbeck
“But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn’t even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters’ marriage. It’s quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quick and vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Rebecca Solnit
“Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown.”
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit
“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

“Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.”
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

John Steinbeck
“In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counter word in English. It is the verb vascular, present participle vacilando. I does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not her gets there, although he has direction. . . We could choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it.”
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

year in books
Amanda
1,046 books | 38 friends

Sheila ...
1,668 books | 41 friends

Jamie
7 books | 50 friends

Vanessa
499 books | 13 friends

Sue Eggers
125 books | 30 friends

Erika L...
12 books | 49 friends

Emily C...
30 books | 95 friends

Stacia ...
0 books | 3 friends

More friends…



Polls voted on by Rachel

Lists liked by Rachel