"I really try to see [each spot I visit] with new eyes, because I don't want to become complacent just because I've lived here for so long. I want to see everything new all the time. [I want] to be always open and aware of my environment and the new things that it's telling me, or the old things that it's reminding me of." — Alexandra de Steiguer HumaNature Podcast Episode 124: The Woman of Star Island
"Fear lives in a past experience or in a future assumption of what might happen." — Kimmy Fasani Outside Podcast: What Snowboarding Has to do With Parenthood, Loss, and Cancer
"[Doubt is part of my process.] We’re conditioned to see doubt as a sign of insecurity and weakness. I wanted to be one of those people who roll through challenges without a second thought. But doubt is natural, and when we learn to stop resisting it, it becomes a potent source of strength. It doesn’t hinder our creativity. It fuels it. Doubt means we’re asking questions, which means we’re alive and awake, paying attention, willing to do things without a guaranteed outcome, to stretch beyond our edge, and grow in unknown ways." — Katie Arnold What the HELL Was I Thinking?, Work in Process
"[C]ontent will not make us content. (Talking about how there's too much meaningless content online, and the ever-present urge to consume it all won't make us content, aka happy. I need to work on this one!)" — Katie Arnold Content, Work in Process
"Resilience doesn't come from comfort. And so I'm not wishing you a life free of discomfort. I'm wishing you a life where you can handle the discomforts that are inevitably going to come. And I think about that's what my journey in the mountains so much has taught me is not how to prevent all of the things that don't feel good, but how to lean into the ones that are there to teach us." — Melissa Arnot Reid Outside Podcast, "Climbing Everest is Easy Compared to Surviving an Abusive Parent"
"We experience all sorts of “lasts” without necessarily recognizing it in the moment. We forget, swept up in the next chapter of our lives. And while some things are meant to be fleeting, others we aren’t so quick to let go of. And that is how you know what’s really important to you." — Jen Gurecki Prison, birthing children, and cancer, Redefining Radical
"If we stay in the story too long, it becomes a cage." — Cory Richards The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within
"I have to believe in complete healing. I have to surround myself with people who believe it, too. I have to see it and feel it and live it. I have to train my mind to heal my body...This is how it works: my mind transporting me back to a time when I was healthy, and, at the same time, ahead to when I will be again...I dream about walking. The setting and characters change, but the plot is always the same: I’m injured and on crutches and then, without thinking, I take one free step and then another...I no longer refer to my left leg as my broken leg: it’s my healing leg...Recovery isn’t something that will happen. It is happening...Healing isn’t a mysterious, passive process that’s happening to me, but one that I am creating." — Katie Arnold Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World
"Sitting taught me how to pay attention without creating stories around what I saw...Everything is Zen when you see it clearly for what it is, rather than what you want it to be." — Katie Arnold Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World
"Imagining a feeling of happiness, especially during meditation, starts to shape our lives toward it despite no external factors changing at all." — Cory Richards The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within
"It’s strange how we miss things the most just as they’re about to end." — Katie Arnold Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World
"I am and always will be the optimist. The hoper of far-flung hopes and the dreamer of improbable dreams." — 11th Doctor Doctor Who, "The Almost People"
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Airman's Odyssey
"There is little room for others when we’re consumed by ourselves." — Cory Richards The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within
"The life before had happened to me as childhood happens to everyone. The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life. Thirty years old. I was now an adult, with or without my consent, and adults are responsible for their lives. I wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child – why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns the patterns of living. Every second has value. But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what’s next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel." — Laurence Gonzales Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
"Was I the person, the climber, that I believed I had been? Those events shaped who I was, and now they were receding into the distance." — Chris Jones Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968
"There are a few vestiges of my high school years who I paid visits to here and there throughout college, or bump into now and again on social media. It’s a part of my life I no longer identify with. Somewhere that, if I ever did return to, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable in my skin. It’s not that I’m ashamed, or that I don’t cherish the memories, it’s something else. What, I don’t know. For reasons I can’t dimly begin to understand, those disaffected years when I was skating are some of the most nostalgic in my life. They bear no more proximity to my current values and lifestyle...But I don’t want to ruin it by trying to understand it." — Chris Kalman Newsletter
"[Age] is in your head. It’s whatever you believe. You know, my parents were old when they were in their 40s; that’s the way they thought. The way they acted. It was their assumptions about life. I’m not like that; I think you can talk yourself into anything. Age is just a number, as long as your body is willing. Age is meaningless." — Dierdre Wolownick (Alex Honnold's mom) Adventure Journal
