Emma Barr

“What’s crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.”
― Alex Hutchinson, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“So we are told to love. We are told to listen. We are told to look. But a lot of the time we don’t because we choose damn well not to, and because only a saint could do it all the time, I think. You have to choose who to listen to because if you listen to everybody and you look at everybody—seeing every face the way Rembrandt saw that woman’s face—how could you make it down half a city block? You couldn’t. If you listened to what everybody says to you, how could you survive a day? But we can do more than we do—more than we do, surely we could do that.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

“I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.”

He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood.

“I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.”

“The way it is nothing to you,” he said.”
― Tara Westover, Educated