Quotes About Challenge

I felt better than I'd ever felt in all of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel.

By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I've never been.

But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I'd never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.O

The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.

the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.

God was a ruthless bitch.

Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed.

So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless.

He pushed on, pillaging my pack, inquiring sternly each time before tossing another item I'd previously deemed necessary into the get-rid-of pile.

It is, I guess, exactly what you're stuck with if you can't get some perspective on this matter, sweet pea.

One is the life you'll have; the other is the one you won't. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won't let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?

I continued up, into the late afternoon and evening, unable to see anything except what was immediately before me. I wasn't thinking of snakes, as l'd been the day before. I wasn't thinking. I'm hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail. I wasn't even thinking, What have I gotten myself into? I was thinking only of moving myself forward.

Testing yourself means relinquishing the things you believe have so far kept you safe or comfortable

Difficulty, solitude, and risk are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It's because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance. It forges us out of who we were before into the person we will become.

Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you truly so cowed by adversity?

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle

You listed the three options you believe you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you're fucked before you begin.

on the PCT, broke, but okay—getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable person would have said I couldn't afford to do it.

This is not your responsibility but it is your problem.

We're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us twenty nine to one. They can't get away from us now!

And what happens when we do better? Does the doubt go away? Of course not; we just doubt things on an entirely new level. So we keep trying. And the bigger the doubts, the harder we try.

Rise to the challenge, he told himself. You can do it. Because you have to. Inwardly Kesselring sighed. He had always thought people who espoused the wonders of positive thinking were deluding themselves.