Brian Fullford

“When I choose pride over vulnerability, I find that relying on my own strength makes me weak.”
― Patrick Gray, I'll Push You: A Journey of 500 Miles, Two Best Friends, and One Wheelchair

“By the time we reach the top of the trail, where it reunites with the mountain road, we are greeted by two volunteer police officers in a bright yellow truck. They had heard about our climb and were waiting for us on the road. No words are exchanged, except a gruff but sincere “¡Buen Camino!” as one of the officers grabs the red nylon harness at the front of my chair and begins to pull me the rest of the way into O Cebreiro, while his partner drives the truck behind us with lights flashing. When we finally make it to the top, all I can do is look around at the people who have given so much for me today. As we gather together for a photo, “thank you” doesn’t seem like nearly enough after all they’ve done, but it’s all I can give.”
― Patrick Gray, I'll Push You: A Journey of 500 Miles, Two Best Friends, and One Wheelchair

“Still, she was doing her best, struggling to think like a survivor. When she found that the seaweed with which they’d covered themselves sustained a vast number of tiny creatures, “I was dazzled by the life it supported…an entire world, self-sufficient and complete.” To be open to the world in which you find yourself, to be able to experience wonder at its magnificence, is to begin to admit its reality and adapt to it. Be here now. It is to place yourself in relation to it, to say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still. To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe. A survival emergency is a Rorschach test. It will quickly tell you who you are.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“Christopher Burney, the British officer who was held in Buchenwald and other German prison camps, was kept in solitary confinement for years during World War II. At first, he told himself he’d be out by Christmas. When Christmas passed, he hoped to be released by Easter. When that, too, passed and summer came, “I dismissed my old impatience from my mind,” he wrote in Solitary Confinement, “seeing such promise in the summer weather that no reservation, with its hidden pessimism, was now necessary…I could be patient for three more months.” That is the way a survivor thinks. When I was working in maximum-security prisons in the early 1980s, I remember one convict telling me, “I could do a nickel standing on my head.” When I asked how he did it, he said, “You got to stay inside yo’ mine.” That’s survivor thinking.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why