Quotes About Resilience

As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this—the hardest thing I'd ever done. I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

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.

That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I'd lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me.

If your Nerve, deny you – Go above your Nerve – EMILY DICKINSON

Hoe wild het is, om alles te accepteren zoals het zich voordoet.

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.

Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the bottom of a deep well.

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.

Who is tougher than me? No one.

Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL

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

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It's good you've worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

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

Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid. When

This isn't about strength," said Pat. "And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time—it could be years from now—when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.

It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds,

I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

There wasn't a day on the trail when that monotony didn't ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way to a hundred and starting over again at one. Each time I completed another set it seemed as if I'd achieved a small thing. Then a hundred became too optimistic and I went to fifty, then twenty-five, then ten.