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"I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations.It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude."
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"I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations.It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis
"If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad-if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law-it would become my law."
"From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn't walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall-feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I'd survived rape-I'd have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.I wrote it."
"I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw."
"Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament."
"And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren't, and so anything-great and terrible-felt possible to me now."
"The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard."
"I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves."
"The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry."
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