Quotes from Robyn Davidson

I made lists of lists of lists, then started all over again. And if I did something that wasn't on a list, I would promptly write it on one and cross it out, with the feeling of having at least accomplished something.

The discomfort I felt under that moral pressure has stayed with me all my life and made me eternally wary of the blindness of ideological certainty.

I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks

Camel trips do not begin or end, they merely change form.

Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it.

Before that moment, I had always supposed that loneliness was my enemy. I had seemed not to exist without people around me. But now I understood that I had always been a loner, and that this condition was a gift rather than something to be feared. Alone, in my castle, I could see more clearly what loneliness was.

It's important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it's hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we've learnt even if what we do changes us and we risk not recognizing each other when we return.

In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, 'This is a rock,' I could now say, 'This is part of a net,' or closer, 'This, which everything acts upon, acts.' When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself stretched out for ever.

I had paid for this over and over with moments of neurotic despair, but it had been worth it. I had somehow always countered my desire for a knight in shining armour by forming bonds with men I didn't like, or with men who were so off the air there was no hope of a permanent relationship.

the good Lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable – hope, jokes and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns — small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track.

Mountains pulled and pushed, wind roared down chasms. I followed eagles suspended from cloud horizons. I wanted to fly in the unlimited blue of the morning.

I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.

And so I pushed it all down into the dim recesses of my mind, there to fester and grow like botulism.

resort. Yes, exactly, only now, after all this time, I had discovered that the grenade was a dud, and I could hop right back to that same old spot which was safety. The excruciating thing was that those two selves were now warring with each other. I wanted desperately to find those camels, and I wanted desperately not to find them. The pilot snapped me back to the present dilemma. 'Well, what do you want to do? Shall

I believe the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up. So

And so back up the ravines to the comfortable places (the sane ones?) where we don't have to think too much. Where life is, after all, just 'getting by' and where we survive, half asleep.

I wandered and roamed through my domain, my private space, smelling its essence, accepting its claim on me and incorporating every dust mote, every spider's web into an orgy of possessive bliss.

One of the questions we need to ask, if we are to have a future, she says, is "Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?" One answer is: when we were nomadic. "It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment.

I believe the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.

AAAAHHHHHHHhhhhh! WHOOSH, WHOOSH, YOU BASTARD!

In different places, survival requires different things, based on the environment. Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.

The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.