Potent Quotable (July 2024)

“She woke knowing that if she was to cross the desert she must shed burdens.” -Doris Lessing

“But strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day, month after month. Things you only become totally conscious of in retrospect. For one thing I had remembered in minute and Technicolor detail everything that had ever happened in my past and all the people who belonged there. I had remembered every word of conversations I had or overheard way, way back in my childhood and in this way I had been able to review these events with a kind of emotional detachment as if they had happened to somebody else. I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten. I had dredged up things I had no idea existed. People, faces, names, places, feelings, bits of knowledge, all waiting for inspection. It was a giant cleansing of all the garbage and muck that had accumulated in my brain, a gentle catharsis. And because of that, I suppose, I could now see much more clearly into my present relationships with people and with myself. And I was happy, there is simply no other word for it.” -Robyn Davidson

“The principle difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin, the greater the adventure). A margin whose width and breadth may be determined by unknown factors, but whose successful navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurer’s nerve and wits. It is always exhilarating to live by one’s nerves or towards the summit of one’s wits.” -Tom Robbins

“When the beliefs of one culture are translated into the language of another culture, the word “superstition” often crops up.” -Robyn Davidson

“The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.” -Robyn Davidson

Be good to each other,

Nathan