Nando Parrado > Quotes

“I had always thought that life was the actual thing, the natural thing, and that death was simply the end of living. Now, in this lifeless place, I saw with a terrible clarity that death was the constant, death was the base, and life was only a short, frgile dream. I was dead already. I had been born death, and what I thought was my life was just a game death let me play as it waited to take me. . .

Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love. How had I missed that? How does anyone miss that? Love is our only weapon. Only love can turn mere life into a miracle, and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear. For a brief, magical moment, all my fears lifted, and I knew that I would not let death control me. I would walk through the godforsaken country that separated me from my home with love and hope in my heart. I wouuld walk until I had walked all the life out of me, and when I fell I would die that much closer to my father.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“As we used to say in the mountains, "Breathe. Breathe again. With every breath, you are alive." After all these years, this still the best advice I can give you: Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child. The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can't understand His will; He can't be explained in a book. He didn't abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change. He simply is. I don't pray to God for forgiveness or favors, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don't need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“My duty is to fill my time on earth with as much life as possible, to become a little more human every day, and to understand that we only become human when we love.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“We all have our personal Andes.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“So I would teach myself to live in constant uncertainty, moment by moment, step by step. I would live as if I were dead already. With nothing to lose, nothing could surprise me, nothing could stop me from fighting; my fears would not block me from following my instincts, and no risk would be too great.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“Even here, even as we suffer, life is still worth living....”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“I am no wise man. Every day shows me how little I know about life, and how wrong I can be. But there are things I know to be true. I know I will die. And I know that the only sane response to such a horror is to love.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“In the years since the disaster, I often think of my friend Arturo Nogueira, and the conversations we had in the mountains about God. Many of my fellow survivors say they felt the personal presence of God in the mountains. He mercifully allowed us to survive, they believe, in answer to our prayers, and they are certain it was His hand that led us home. I deeply respect the faith of my friends, but, to be honest, as hard as I prayed for a miracle in the Andes, I never felt the personal presence of God. At least, I did not feel God as most people see Him. I did feel something larger than myself, something in the mountains and the glaciers and the glowing sky that, in rare moments, reassured me, and made me feel that the world was orderly and loving and good. If this was God, it was not God as a being or a spirit or some omnipotent, superhuman mind. It was not a God who would choose to save us or abandon us, or change in any way. It was simply a silence, a wholeness, an awe-inspiring simplicity. It seemed to reach me through my own feelings of love, and I have often thought that when we feel what we call love, we are really feeling our connection to this awesome presence. I feel this presence still when my mind quiets and I really pay attention. I don’t pretend to understand what it is or what it wants from me. I don’t want to understand these things. I have no interest in any God who can be understood, who speaks to us in one holy book or another, and who tinkers with our lives according to some divine plan, as if we were characters in a play. How can I make sense of a God who sets one religion above the rest, who answers one prayer and ignores another, who sends sixteen young men home and leaves twenty-nine others dead on a mountain?

There was a time when I wanted to know that god, but I realize now that what I really wanted was the comfort of certainty, the knowledge that my God was the true God, and that in the end He would reward me for my faithfulness. Now I understand that to be certain–-about God, about anything–-is impossible. I have lost my need to know. In those unforgettable conversations I had with Arturo as he lay dying, he told me the best way to find faith was by having the courage to doubt. I remember those words every day, and I doubt, and I hope, and in this crude way I try to grope my way toward truth. I still pray the prayers I learned as a child–-Hail Marys, Our Fathers–-but I don’t imagine a wise, heavenly father listening patiently on the other end of the line. Instead, I imagine love, an ocean of love, the very source of love, and I imagine myself merging with it. I open myself to it, I try to direct that tide of love toward the people who are close to me, hoping to protect them and bind them to me forever and connect us all to whatever there is in the world that is eternal. …When I pray this way, I feel as if I am connected to something good and whole and powerful. In the mountains, it was love that kept me connected to the world of the living. Courage or cleverness wouldn’t have saved me. I had no expertise to draw on, so I relied upon the trust I felt in my love for my father and my future, and that trust led me home. Since then, it has led me to a deeper understanding of who I am and what it means to be human. Now I am convinced that if there is something divine in the universe, the only way I will find it is through the love I feel for my family and my friends, and through the simple wonder of being alive. I don’t need any other wisdom or philosophy than this: My duty is to fill my time on earth with as much life as possible, to become a little more human every day, and to understand that we only become human when we love. …For me, this is enough.”
― Nando Parrado

“A human being, as I've said before, gets used to anything.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“I have suffered great losses and have been blessed with great consolations, but whatever life may give me or take away, this is the simple wisdom that will always light my life: I have loved, passionately, fearlessly, with all my heart and all my soul, and I have been loved in return. For me, this is enough.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“I tell them I am not at peace in spite of what I suffered, but because of it.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“I come from a plane that fell into the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for ten days. I have a friend up here who is injured. In the plane there is fourteen injured people. We have to get of here quickly and we don't have any food. We are weak. When are you going to come and fetch us? Please. We can't even walk. Where are we?”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“I saw the error I was making. I had been thinking of the disaster as a horrible mistake, as an unscripted deviation from the happy story of the life I had been promised. But now I began to understand that my ordeal in the Andes was not an interruption of my true destiny, or a perversion of what my life was supposed to be. It simply was my life, and the future that lay ahead was the only future available to me. To hide from this fact, or to live in bitterness and anger, would only keep me from living any genuine life at all.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“My hope is that you who are reading this book will not wait so long to realize what treasures you have. In the Andes we lived heartbeat-to-heartbeat. Every second of life was a gift, glowing with purpose and meaning. I have tried to live that way ever since and it has filled my life with more blessings than I can count. I urge you to do the same. As we used to say in the mountains, "Breathe. Breathe again. With every breath, you are alive." After all these years, this is still the best advice I can give you: Savour your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“We were playing a game against an unknown and unforgiving opponent. The stakes were terrible—play well or die—but we didn’t even know the ground rules.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“The mountain was teaching me a hard lesson: camaraderie is a noble thing, but in the end death is an opponent each of us would face in solitude.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in The Andes

“I know the others saw my behaviour as confident and optimistic, and perhaps it gave them hope. But what looked to them like optimism was really nothing of the sort. It was panic. It was terror. The urge that drove me to trek west was the same urge that drives a man to jump from the top of a burning building. I had always wondered how a person thinks in such a moment, perched on the ledge, cringing from the flames, waiting for the split second when one death makes more sense than another. How does the mind make such a choice? What is the logic that tells you the time has come to step into thin air? This morning I had my answer. I smiled are Carlitos, then turned away before he saw the anguish in my eyes.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“We understood, intuitively, that no one in this awful place could be judged by the standards of the ordinary world.”
― Nando Parrado

“Things make sense. There are rules and realities that will not change to suit your needs. It's your job to understand those rules. If you do, and if you work hard and work smart, you will be all right.”
― Nando Parrado

“I had been thinking of the disaster as a horrible mistake, as an unscripted deviation from the happy story of the life I had been promised. But now I began to understand that my ordeal in the Andes was not an interruption of my true destiny, or a perversion of what my life was supposed to be. It simply was my life, and the future that lay ahead was the only future available to me. To hide from this fact, or to live in bitterness and anger, would only keep me from living any genuine life at all. Before the crash, I took so much for granted, but the mountains showed me that life, any life, is a miracle. Now, miraculously, I had been granted a second chance to live. It was not the life I wanted or expected, but I understood that it was my duty now to live that life as richly and as hopefully as I could. I vowed to try. I would live with passion and curiosity. I would open myself to the possibilities of life. I would savor every moment, and I would try, every day, to become more human and more alive. To do any less, I understood, would be an insult to those who hadn’t survived.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“In my despair, I felt a sharp and sudden longing for the softness of my mother and my sister, and the warm, strong embrace of my father. My love for my father swelled in my heart, and I realized that, despite the hopelessness of my situation, the memory of him filled me with joy. It staggered me: The mountains, for all their power, were not stronger than my attachment to my father. They could not crush my ability to love. I felt a moment of calmness and clarity, and in that clarity of mind I discovered a simple, astounding secret: Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“Each of us realized, with a clarity that is hard to describe, that the only crucial thing in life is the chance to love and be loved.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“When hope is lost, the mind protects us with denial, and my denial protected me from facing what I knew.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child,” Arturo answered. “The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can’t understand His will; He can’t be explained in a book. He didn’t abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change, He simply is. I don’t pray to God for forgiveness or favors, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don’t need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.” I”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“—El sol saldrá mañana —me dijo—, y pasado mañana, y el día después. No dejes que esto sea lo más importante que te ha pasado nunca. Mira hacia delante. Tendrás un futuro. Tendrás una vida.”
― Nando Parrado, Milagro en los Andes

“—Todos tenemos nuestros propios Andes”
― Nando Parrado, Milagro en los Andes

“We were absurdly out of place here, like a seahorse in the desert, or a flower on the moon. A dread began to form in my mind, an unformed thought that I was not yet able to verbalize: Life is an anomaly here, and the mountains will tolerate that anomaly for only so long.”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

“The mountains were forcing me to change”
― Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home