"If you are given two options, take the harder one because you’ll regret it if you don’t. At least if you take the harder one and fail, you’ll have tried." — Alison Hargreaves Interview
"Perhaps [Charles] Pratt's ultimate wisdom took the form of acceptance: understanding that veiled depths surround us. Which, like looming exposure, might suddenly jump at you. Or like serendipitous beauty, might delight. Both sensations are perfectly OK, equally wondrous. And the shapes they assume depend more on your mindset than on the thing itself." — Doug Robinson Alpinist Magazine, Issue 74, "Letters to a Young Climber"
"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." — Wayne Dyer
"Or you could rise. That 'or' is always available to us, no matter how vehemently we pretend it’s not." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. ... Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." — Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." — Helen Keller The Open Door
"The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And everything ends." — Sarah Jane Smith Doctor Who, "School Reunion"
"Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity." — Unknown
"Fear can create a positive feedback loop. We are afraid, so we shrink and further invite the thing that scares us to occur. To beat the fear, to give ourselves a fighting chance at realizing the best possible outcome, we have to go all in and face it." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"Courage isn’t a matter of not being frightened, you know. It’s being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway." — 3rd Doctor Doctor Who, "Planet of the Daleks"
"It all boils down to fear. Fear is such a powerful emotion. Sometimes it keeps us safe, but more often, it keeps us from taking the risks that propel us forward. On the flip side, it can be a fantastic motivator." — Julie Hotz She Explores, Episode 2, "On Fear: Human Powered Travel"
"We are all existing on thin ice, not only in the mountains. Each loss evokes the often-invisible voids beneath our feet. Each threshold moment can seem to open a multitude of branching, alternative timelines, like the patterns of frost on a window, curling into infinite fractal forms, tracing phantom narratives of falls untaken, ice unbroken, illnesses uncaught, decisions unmade." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
"When the air chills, I, too, watch myself turn, temporarily, to crystal. Rime slowly forms along the loose strands of my hair, in thicker and thicker flowers of white and silver, encrusting my lashes until I have to rub my eyes or blink hard to keep my vision clear." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
"I've seen deep-green moss and delicate alpine plants glow emerald, burgundy and gold beneath a spume of translucent ice—safely beneath the reach of my sharp axe and crampon points—like miniature worlds of living things preserved in giant drops of amber or globes of glass." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
"You are refined, not defined, by defeat." — Aaron Eveland
"Whenever you fall, pick up something." — Oswald Theodore Avery
"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default." — JK Rowling Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
"However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far removed from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown." — JK Rowling Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
"It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet and what is sand." — Madeleine L'Engle The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
"Failure is only failure if you fail to learn from it." — Unknown
