Quotes from Laurence Gonzales

We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.

Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion.

Helping someone else is the best way to ensure your own survival. It takes you out of yourself. It helps you to rise above your fears. Now you're a rescuer, not a victim. And seeing how your leadership and skill buoy others up gives you more focus and energy to persevere. The cycle reinforces itself: You buoy them up, and their response buoys you up. Many people who survive alone report that they were doing it for someone else (a wife, boyfriend, mother, son) back home.

With the illusion that we have dominion over the earth we conclude we have nothing to fear.

It's like an Irish family. They fight like hell among themselves. They want nothing to do with each other. But you throw a disaster at them, and they're all shoulder to shoulder and they'll do whatever it takes. They don't stop for one minute to think what their personal cost or toll is going to be in it, they just do it.

The perfect adventure shouldn't be that much more hazardous in a real sense than ordinary life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break. We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer. Better to take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information, and then go forward in the knowledge that we've done everything we can. No

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.

Shit happens, and if we just want to restrict ourselves to things where shit can't happen... we're not going to do anything very interesting.

The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it's not what's in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It's not even what's in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it's what's in your heart.

On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use.

Psychologists have observed that one of the most basic human needs, beginning at birth, is to be gazed upon by another. Mothers throughout the world have been observed spending long periods staring into the eyes of their babies with a characteristic tilt of the head. To be seen is to be real, and without another to gaze upon us, we are nothing. Part of the terror of being lost stems from the idea of never being seen again.)

Knowledge of the sort you need does not begin with information, it begins with experience and perception. But there is a dark and twisty road from experience and perception to correct action.

Only 10 to 20 percent of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency.

Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. "You're going to die when you're supposed to die.

Whether a deity is actually listening or not, there is value in formally announcing your needs, desires, worries, sins, and goals in a focused, prayerful attitude. Only when you are aware can you take action.

CHARLES PERROW is a sociologist known for studying industrial accidents, such as those that occur with nuclear power plants, airlines, and shipping. In Normal Accidents, he wrote that "We construct an expected world because we can't handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction.