9 Quotes by Lauren Elkin

Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.

It is the condition of the historian to be constantly picturing the past, thrilled and obsessed by it, without for one moment wanting to be a part of it.

The past feels as distant as another planet, even when I'm standing on its terrain.

I walk because it confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.

Walking is mapping with your feet

Living between cities, we are abandoned by them as much as they are by us, because if they gave us all we needed, we wouldn't have to leave.

No hubo manifestación de protesta. Pero nos buscamos y nos abrazamos en la plaza. Algún día todo eso será un recuerdo. Algún día, más allá de eso, abra una placa. Y algún día todos pasarán por delante, con algo más por lo que protestar o que demostrar, y tal vez pensarán en nosotros.

The streets of Paris had a way of making me stop in my tracks, my heart suspended. They seemed saturated with presence, even if there was no one there but me. These were places where something could happen, or had happened, or both; a feeling I could never have had at home in New York, where life is inflected with the future tense.

[Marie Bashkirtseff] did spend days walking the slums of Paris with her notebook in hand, sketching everything she saw, research which would produce numerous paintings, including 1884’s A Meeting, which now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and depicts a group of young street urchins gathered on a street corner.