Quotes About Courage

when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

The father's job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it's necessary to do so. If you don't get that from your father, you have to teach yourself." O

If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

it with their fingers out of my hands,

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.

I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.

There was nothing to do but go on.

I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.

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.

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

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

Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get to be junk.

I was lost but I was not afraid,

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

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong.

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn't just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

It was as if I'd finally come across a mountian lion and I'd remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him with my fear.

It's the threadbare cape you've wrapped around yourself composed of self-pitying half truth. And it absolutely will not serve you.

Put yourself in the way of beauty.

If I believed in God, I'd see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. That would have been true regardless of the outcome of Emma's surgery. It would have been the grace that carried you through even if things had not gone as well as they did, much as we hate to ponder that.

Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

Fear begets fear. Power begets power.

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