Sue > Sue's Quotes

“Every walk of life falls under the Testicular Imperative: Either you have the world by them, or it has you.”
― Colin Fletcher

“But if you judge safety to be the paramount consideration in life you should never, under any circumstances, go on long hikes alone. Don’t take short hikes alone, either – or, for that matter, go anywhere alone. And avoid at all costs such foolhardy activities as driving, falling in love, or inhaling air that is almost certainly riddled with deadly germs. Wear wool next to the skin. Insure every good and chattel you possess against every conceivable contingency the future might bring, even if the premiums half-cripple the present. Never cross an intersection against a red light, even when you can see all roads are clear for miles. And never, of course, explore the guts of an idea that seems as if it might threaten one of your more cherished beliefs. In your wisdom you will probably live to be a ripe old age. But you may discover, just before you die, that you have been dead for a long, long time.”
― Colin Fletcher, Complete Walker III

“The more you know, the less you need.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.”
― Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

“Theirs was the Norway of witchcraft, storytelling, and incest, not minimalist furniture and the Nobel Peace Prize. Rural”
― Blair Braverman, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North

“The only currency that we really have to spend during our lives is time. Everything else is just a sub-category.”
― Stephen R. Bown

“A hero, in his mind, was not someone who suffered disaster after disaster, heroically pulling through with great endurance, but rather one who focused his intelligence and skills to avoid disaster, thus succeeding by good planning and crafty decision making.”
― Stephen R. Bown, The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen

“We need to quit living as if the purpose of life is to arrive safely at death.”
― Mark Batterson, Wild Goose Chase: Reclaim the Adventure of Pursuing God

“the way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with new truths that run down from the top of the head
and out of the heart”
― Charles Bukowski

“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“We are in the process of instituting a reign of terror on earth, and there’s only one word that justifies that as far as these savages are concerned: the word of this or that god. In name of a divine entity we can do whatever the hell we like and most of those fools down there will swallow it like a bitter pill.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“The moon is profound except when we land on it.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage 
unless you're scared.”
― Eddie Rickenbacker

“Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr.

“Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“Then a beat-up car lurched into sight towing an even more beat-up car. As the cars came near, I saw that they were connected back to front by a loop made of two seat belts buckled to each other. That was the only time I ever saw a Russian use a seat belt for any purpose at all.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“All food available in the depths of the ocean is animal matter, and the food chain depends upon the constant rain of minuscule particles ('undersea snow') from the surface layers, usually the remains of animals that have died. 'When I think of the floor of the deep sea,' wrote Rachel Carson, 'the single overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments. I always see the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer - a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of years, that will go on as long as there are seas and continents.' Life in the depths depends upon death in the shallows.”
― Richard Ellis, Singing Whales and Flying Squid: The Discovery of Marine Life

“The Harvard Nurses’ Health Study found that eating just one serving of lettuce or other vitamin K–rich foods (leafy greens and veggies) a day can cut the risk of hip fracture in half compared to eating just one serving a week.”
― Stacy Sims, Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life

“A 2020 study of more than 300 women whose average age was 55, published in BMC Psychiatry, reported that 55 percent had mild to severe depression and nearly 84 percent had mild to severe anxiety. Poor body image was strongly connected to both.”
― Stacy T. Sims, Next Level: Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond

“A dog creates, transcribes, a new landscape for you. A dog like Colter sharpens your joy of all the seasons, and for a while, sometimes a long while, such a dog seems capable, by himself alone, of holding time in place--of pinning it, and holding it taught. And then when he is gone, it is as if the world is taken away.

Dogs like that are young for what seems like a very long time....

One you have lost a dog--especially the first you trained from a pup, the one you first set sail into the world with--you can never fully give of yourself to another dog. You can never again look at a dog you love without hedging a tiny bit, if only subconsciously, against the day when that dog, too, must leave. You can never again hunt or enter the future so recklessly, so joyously, with that weight of forethought....

As I sleep restlessly, night after night, or more often, as I lie there awake, I can see him running and I feel guilty that I am not there to honor the birds he is finding... One way or the other, he is still out there running. He will never rest.... I will always want him to know a moment's rest, and peace, and he will always know in his hot heart that the only peace to be gotten is by never resting, by always pushing on.

He is my Colter.... I am still his, and he is still mine.”
― Rick Bass, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had – A Memoir of Raging Genius, Loyal Spirit, and Canine Companionship in Montana

“We sat perfectly still in the dim light as the wolf approached closer, head cocked, mouth closed, and ears semi-erect. With these signs of both curiosity and trepidation, it took a step forward and then backed off a ways, then took a few steps forward again. It lifted its nose and sniffed intently, and finally stopped at about eight feet away. For a moment all three of us were perfectly still, wondering what was going to happen next.”
― David Moskowitz, Wolves in the Land of Salmon