# Quote — Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

> Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.

- Author: [Rebecca Solnit](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit.md)
- Book: [Wanderlust](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/wanderlust.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit#Wanderlust:_A_History_of_Walking_(2001)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/wanderlust/walking-has-been

## More from this book

> This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else's field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn't stop in any of them on its long route.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/wanderlust/this-history-of-walking.md)

> Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rebecca-solnit/wanderlust/most-of-the.md)