Hiking The Pct Quotes

“How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“I get to stop now. Stop hiking, and maybe with time, stop other things too. Stop knocking at a door that doesn't want to let me in.”
― Luke Healy, Americana

“Under gold clouds, he pushed the limits of my body, setting a faster pace—some days surpassing forty rugged miles, unstopping through morning’s thick peach haze; noon’s warmth; red evening sun.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person 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 wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“In fact, because I liked him so badly, I needed to continue on my course. I was finally becoming the woman I wanted to be, and she was whom I needed to show Dash—and myself.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“Happy people have everything to give.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I began to lust after our conjoining life.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn’t know how to tell him we’d been enmeshed for as long as I could remember.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.”
― Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

“My mom used to tell me, “I don’t like my mother, but I love her.”
― 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

“The freedom of the woods lingered in me here; I felt lighter. I hoped to be changed by it, allow this seeding independence to root in my childhood Eden’s soil and grow until at last it was undeniable.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Fires will rage in California. And I'll wake from nightmares of lions at my tent. And I'll feel like a crazy person when I talk to people about the trail. And I'll ache to come back.”
― Luke Healy, Americana