Aspen Matis Quotes

“Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“The entire time, he’d only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn’t the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn’t have heard me. He’d never responded, not by stopping, not with his words.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“My mother overstated the dangers of the world – invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’t truly real.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“My beauty and independence were new for me. They brought me pride and satisfaction; they changed my sense of possibility. I felt awake in my body. Living in the woods, building my little shelter each night, a silent shadow, drifting in and out of mountain towns, a ghost, I was entirely self-reliant. On the trail I had persisted despite fear, and walking the Pacific Crest had led me deeply into happiness. I felt amazing now. In this body that brought me twelve hundred miles, I felt I could do anything.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“My body was smarter than I was. I was with someone who would never hurt me, and so I finally relaxed.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall—feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I’d survived rape—I’d have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.

This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.

I wrote it.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted people. He was my hero, too, and I listened to him. He gave me lots of wise advice. He told me to put myself in win-win situations, and that, “You have to know what you want, and you have to get it,”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I’d convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn’t think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted I couldn’t see, and I accepted it was there, strange but – from where I stood – a beautiful vision.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always known the way. If I’d only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“He hadn’t treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadn’t found it yet, but I would find it soon.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“This was a vision of wildness contained – caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.

Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I hated my inability to explain my life on the trail to her and my mother’s inability to comprehend. I hated her consistent need to know the list of different foods I’d eaten that day. I remembered how she’d asked me if I’d had a good dinner in the same phone call when I’d told her I’d been raped.

I considered, tomorrow night, not calling her.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I’d been, to find who I wanted to be. To become her. To love her, Deborah, Debby, Doll Girl, Wild Child, me, despite the irreversible truth that I’d been raped. I was learning again that I could trust myself and, also, I was seeing, other people. I was brave enough now to go out alone towards what I wanted, to trust that I was strong enough for it, to know that help would come when I needed it. It always came.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn’t nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably — this name that I’d been given at birth that defined me before I’d had the chance to define myself.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Squatting on my bed–after twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total–I put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in the contact, my apartment where I now lived alone and my story coming into focus.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir