Quotes from Laurence Gonzales

Heaven and earth are inhumane; they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs.

Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.

Once the stage of psychological disintegration is reached, death is often not far away," John Leach writes in Survival Psychology. "[T]he ability people possess to die gently, and often suddenly, through no organic cause, is a very real one.

the Zen concept of the beginner's mind, the mind that remains open and ready despite years of training. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. "In the expert's mind there are few.

Logic doesn't work well for such nonlinear systems as chess and life.

who had thought she was having

Until I realized that I was asking myself the wrong question. I was asking myself, Why me?" She gradually realized that she could ask a different question: What do I do as a result of having had that experience? "That was the big shift: What now?" She became almost breathless as she tried to explain the changes she experienced once she had shifted from "Why me?" to "What now?

If you find yourself in enough trouble to be staring death in the face, you've gotten there by a well-worn path.

Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death.

It's the nature of our society that I'm considered unworthy of huge financial reward for that risk. But what can be earned is a certain nobility—not in the sense of aristocratic status but in the sense of striving for quality and dignity of behavior and living.

The rigid person is a disciple of death; The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life.

As an eminent neuroscientist, Damasio is as qualified as anyone to define the brain, and he calls it an "'organ' of information and government.

Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.

The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.

To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.

We don't understand the power of nature and the world because we don't live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.

The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.

The summit is not the only place on the mountain.

The sun beams are always there. The trick is in seeing them.

What does brace mean, anyway? Brace. Such an odd word. It comes from the Latin brachium, meaning arm. It means, as its heart, to embrace. It was a hug. A hug good-bye.

To survive, you must develop secondary emotions that function in a strategic balance with reason.

I am constantly surrounded by a display of natural wonders...It is beauty surrounded by ugly fear. I write in my log that it's a view of heaven from a seat in hell. (survivor after 53 days at sea)

To lose everything at such a glorious eternity is far sweeter than to win by plodding through a cautious, painless, featureless life.