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"I didn't know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now."
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"Fish are small, but do not drown in the sea. Ships are big, but sink in the ocean."
"Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored."
"Money is good, but I prefer food, water, gold, weapon and energy."
"Endurance is more important than truth because without endurance there can't be any truth. And truth means going to the end like you mean it. That way, death itself comes up short when it grabs."
"Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold."
"I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis
"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."
"I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality."
"My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn't looked toward it. I wasn't lost. I'd always known the way. If I'd only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared."
"I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic."
"The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard."
"Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness."
"We aren't afraid of what we can explain. But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn't understand."
"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."
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