Ivett > Ivett's Quotes

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.

It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse

“One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”
― Krishnamurti

“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exuper

“Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.”
― Werner Karl Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

“Coincidences give you opportunities to look more deeply into your existence.”
― Doug Dillon

“There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.” “Oh, Mom,” was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“my happy is a high fever that will break, my happy is as hollow as a pin-pricked egg”
― Sabrina Benaim, Depression & Other Magic Tricks

“sure, i make plans. i make plans but i don't want to go. i make plans because i know i should want to go, i know at some point i would have wanted to go, it's just not that much fun having fun when you don't want to have fun.”
― Sabrina Benaim, Depression & Other Magic Tricks

“My heart is a messy bedroom I always distract myself from cleaning.”
― Sabrina Benaim, Depression & Other Magic Tricks

“i am sleepwalking on an ocean of happiness i cannot baptize myself in.”
― Sabrina Benaim, Depression & Other Magic Tricks

“my heart has developed a kind of amnesia, where it remembers everything but itself.”
― Sabrina Benaim, Depression & Other Magic Tricks

“i wouldn't say I'm sensitive, I would say I'm highly susceptible to feeling a lot”
― Sabrina Benaim, Depression & Other Magic Tricks