Quotes from Robyn Davidson

The two important things 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 endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.

That arrogance of youth and that kind of ignorant confidence can get you through a whole lot of things, and then life does its stuff, and you get smashed around and beaten up. You get full of doubts, and you end up making a person out of those bits and pieces.

You can trick yourself into doing things by doing it one step at a time and never letting yourself see the overall picture.

I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that's becoming a very precious and rare commodity.

I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space.

Camels are still trained in Alice Springs for tourist jaunts and for occasional sale to Australia's zoos.

The desert is natural; when you are out there, you can get in tune with your environment, something you lose when you live in the city.

When 'Tracks' first came out, I was courted by Sydney Pollack. I had lunch with him, and he opened the conversation with, 'Honey, you ain't gonna like what I'm gonna do to your book.' I really liked him, but I turned him down, because - well, I was stupid. I also turned down a great deal of money.

If you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt.

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

At the age of 25, I gave up my study of Japanese language and culture at university in Brisbane and moved to the town of Alice Springs.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

I think a lot of writers are unrealistic about having their books translated into film.

The idea of finding things out, I hope that will stay with me until I drop.

That odd idea that one person can go to a foreign part and in this rather odd voice describe it to the folks back home doesn't make much sense in the post-colonial world.

My sense of myself is that I was a rather unformed kind of person trying to make myself up out of bits of spit and string.

In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.

As we've lost this idea of pilgrimage, we've lost this idea of human beings walking for a very, very long time. It does change you.

My own memories are packed tightly away. I very rarely bring them out for viewing.