Quotes About Adversity

There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding.

I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail this darkly.

when I removed my first aid kit from my pack and opened it up, all of my Band-Aids blew away.

La paura genera paura. La forza genera forza.

You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding. And, dear one, you and I both were granted a mighty generous hand.

When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, "Samurai Song

I'd loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose.

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked.

You dont have the right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding...

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.

was who I was: the same woman who pulsed beneath the bruise of her old life, only now I was somewhere else.

This is not how your story ends. It's simply where it takes a turn you didn't expect.

all the women who wanted to be hobos were holed up in some house with a gaggle of children to raise. Children who'd been fathered by hobo men who'd hit the road.

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.

But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.

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.

suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice.

No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.

No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.