What are some Robyn Davidson quotes?

"The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision." "And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them " "Real travel would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another's eyes" - Robyn Davidson

How many quotes did Robyn Davidson wrote?

The author Robyn Davidson wrote around 46 of quotes.

63 Robyn Davidson Quotes on Australia, Tracks and Desert Places

Q: What is the best Robyn Davidson quote?

"It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs." - Robyn Davidson

Q: What are some short Robyn Davidson quotes?

"I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back." "To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and" "...desert time refused to structure itself. It preferred instead to flow in curlicues, vortices and tunnels,..." - Robyn Davidson

I just don’t see myself as a travel writer. I can’t. I don’t.

That odd idea that one person can go to a foreign part and in this rather odd voice describe it to the folks back home doesn’t make much sense in the post-colonial world.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns – small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track.

By now I was utterly deprogrammed. I walked along naked usually, clothes being not only putrid but unnecessary. My skin had been baked a deep terra-cotta brown and was the constituency of harness leather. The sun no longer penetrated it. I retained my hat.

The 70s were a wonderful time to be young. I think most young people at that time were pushing the boundaries, asking all sorts of questions of society, of life and of themselves. They were very politicised. It was part of the air that we breathed.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns – small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence – and lasted about ten seconds.

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

I hate hats! Hats just give you really bad hair! I had a hat sometimes. Frankly, you get burnt so much anyway, it’s beside the point. And when you’re walking into the western sun, no hat in the world is going to save your face and neck from being sizzled.

Before that moment, I had always supposed that loneliness was my enemy. I had seemed not to exist without people around me. But now I understood that I had always been a loner, and that this condition was a gift rather than something to be feared. Alone, in my castle, I could see more clearly what loneliness was.

I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there’s no going back.

When I die, this is the only gold that will go with me. What does one take after death? Just one’s good deeds and the love of others.

When there is no one to remind you what society’s rules are, and there is nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes.

It is better to proceed with one’s duty in the service of others than wallow in the pain attachments bring.

I believe that the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditional, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.

Real travel would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another’s eyes.

The good Lord in his ultimate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable: hope, jokes, and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs.

And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them.

In different places, survival requires different things, based on the environment. Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

One of the questions we need to ask, if we are to have a future, she says, is "Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?" One answer is: when we were nomadic. "It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment.

No Fixed Address Quotes

It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and we risk not recognizing each other when we return.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

Camel trips do not begin or end, they merely change form.

Wisdom Quotes / Camel Quotes Life Quotes Trips Quotes

resort. Yes, exactly, only now, after all this time, I had discovered that the grenade was a dud, and I could hop right back to that same old spot which was safety. The excruciating thing was that those two selves were now warring with each other. I wanted desperately to find those camels, and I wanted desperately not to find them. The pilot snapped me back to the present dilemma. ‘Well, what do you want to do? Shall

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

And so I pushed it all down into the dim recesses of my mind, there to fester and grow like botulism.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.

Inspirational Quotes / Adventure Quotes Survival Quotes

the good Lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable – hope, jokes and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs.

Tracks Quotes

I made lists of lists of lists, then started all over again. And if I did something that wasn’t on a list, I would promptly write it on one and cross it out, with the feeling of having at least accomplished something.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. ‘Watch out, be careful, watch.’ ‘Don’t climb trees, don’t dirty your dress, don’t accept lifts from strange men. Listen but don’t learn, you won’t need it.’ And so the snail’s antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness. And

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one’s weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and best of all I had learnt to laugh.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

The thing that impressed me most was that Eddie should have been bitter and he was not. He had used the incident for his own entertainment and mine. Whether he also used it for my edification I do not know. But I thought about this old man then. And his people. Thought about how they’d been slaughtered, almost wiped out, forced to live on settlements that were more like concentration camps, then poked, prodded, measured and taped, had photos of their sacred business printed in colour in heavy academic anthropological texts, had their sacred secret objects stolen and taken to museums, had their potency and integrity drained from them at every opportunity, had been reviled and misunderstood by almost every white in the country, and then finally left to rot with their cheap booze and our diseases and their deaths, and I looked at this marvellous old half-blind codger laughing his socks off as if he had never experienced any of it, never been the butt of a cruel ignorant bigoted contempt, never had a worry in his life, and I thought, OK old man, if you can, me too.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, ‘This is a rock,’ I could now say, ‘This is part of a net,’ or closer, ‘This, which everything acts upon, acts.’ When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself stretched out for ever.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

One continues to learn things in life, then promptly forget them.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.

Joy Quotes Travel Quotes / Inspiration Quotes Letters Quotes Life Quotes Tracks Quotes

I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks,

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

The discomfort I felt under that moral pressure has stayed with me all my life and made me eternally wary of the blindness of ideological certainty.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

I had been sick of carrying around the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class.

Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

And I recognized then the process by which I had always attempted difficult things. I had simply not allowed myself to think of the consequences, but had closed my eyes, jumped in, and before I knew where I was, it was impossible to renege. I was basically a dreadful coward, I knew that about myself. The only way I could overcome this was to trick myself with that other self, who lived in dream and fantasy and who was annoyingly lackadaisical and unpractical. All passion, no sense, no order, no instinct for self-preservation. That’s what I had done, and now that cowardly self had discovered an unburnt bridge by which to return to the past. As Renata Adler writes in Speedboat: I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

I had rediscovered people in my past and come to terms with my feelings towards them. I had learnt what love was. That love wanted the best possible for those you cared for even if that excluded yourself. That before, I had wanted to possess people without loving them, and now I could love them and wish them the best without needing them.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

When God made the firs Raika, that man turned to God and said, "You're something else. You've given me two eyes, two ears, two feet, two hands but only one stomach. It isn't fair. Why did you do it?" God laughed at him and answered, "You foolish Raika, don't you realize how much trouble you're going to have filling one?

Inspirational Quotes / Desert Places Quotes

FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS Eddie and I walked together, we played charades trying to communicate and fell into fits of hysteria at each other’s antics. We stalked rabbits and missed, picked bush foods and generally had a good time. He was sheer pleasure to be with, exuding all those qualities typical of old Aboriginal people — strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness, a substantiality that immediately commanded respect.

Tracks: One Woman's Solo Trek Across 1 Quotes 700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

I could not get used to the idea of ther being classes of people inherently inferior to oneself, to whom one could be as odiously condescendign or downright brutal as one likes, yet with whom one lived as intimately as family.

Inspirational Quotes / Desert Places Quotes

... It is better to proceed with one's duty in the service of others than wallow in the pain attachments bring

Inspirational Quotes / Desert Places Quotes

And here I was at the end of my trip, with everything just as fuzzy and unreal as the beginning. It was easier for me to see myself in Rick's lens, riding down to the beach in that cliched sunset, just as it was easier for me to stand with my friends and wave goodbye to the loopy woman with the camels, the itching smell of the dust around us, and in our eyes the feat that we had left so much unsaid. There was an unpronounceable joy and an aching sadness to it. It had all happened too suddenly. I didn't believe this was the end at all. There must be some mistake. Someone had just robbed me of a couple of month in there somewhere. There was not so much an anticlimactic quality about the arrival at the ocean, as the overwhelming feeling that I had somehow misplaced the penultimate scene.

Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

If I had any kind of creed in regard to living among strangers, it was this: once could criticize one's own place, indeed one had a duty to do so, but when crossing a cultural border one left behind judgements as to how life should be organized

Inspirational Quotes / Desert Places Quotes

Why did people circle one another, consumed with either fear or envy, when all the they were fearing or envying was illusion? Why did they build psychological fortresses and barriers around themselves that would take a Ph.D. in safe-cracking to get through, which even they could not penetrate from the inside? And once again I compared European society with Aboriginal. The one so archetypally paranoid, grasping, destructive, the other so sane. I didn't want ever to leave this desert. I knew that I would forget.

Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble.

Freedom Quotes

Camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not being or end: they mere change form.

Life Quotes Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback Quotes

When I die, this is the only gold that will go with me. What does one take after death? Just one's good deeds and the love of others.

Inspirational Quotes

63 Robyn Davidson Quotes on Australia, Tracks and Desert Places - Quotes.pub