Laurence Gonzales Quotes

Shit happens, and if we just want to restrict ourselves to things where shit can't happen... we're not going to do anything very interesting.

The summit is not the only place on the mountain.

To survive you must surrender without giving in, that is to say, fully accept the reality in all its horror and never give up the will to survive. That allows you to quickly adapt to the situation and dedicate yourself to the present moment rather than wallow in denial.

To survive, you must develop secondary emotions that function in a strategic balance with reason.

The firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions. And while all this might seem of purely academic interest, it could prove helpful when your partner breaks his leg at 19,000 feet in a blizzard on a Peruvian mountain. It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They're afraid, too, but they're not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson's trainer, Cus D'Amato, said, Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your

The sun beams are always there. The trick is in seeing them.

Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.

We don't understand the power of nature and the world because we don't live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.

Who had thought she was having

To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.

We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.

Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.

I'm a secular priest ordained by training, experience, and, most important, the willingness to accept the mantle of command. That willingness encompasses the realization that failure is easy, and such failure could kill me or, worse, kill someone else.

Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion.

The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.

With the illusion that we have dominion over the earth we conclude we have nothing to fear.

The perfect adventure shouldn't be that much more hazardous in a real sense than ordinary life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break. We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer. Better to take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information, and then go forward in the knowledge that we've done everything we can. No,

It's like an Irish family. They fight like hell among themselves. They want nothing to do with each other. But you throw a disaster at them, and they're all shoulder to shoulder and they'll do whatever it takes. They don't stop for one minute to think what their personal cost or toll is going to be in it, they just do it.

Gravity is on duty all of the time.

He passed the dead in all their ranks, in all their spectral attitudes. Some lay supine, mouths open in attitudes of near ecstasy, one upon the next, embracing. Some had bowed their heads as if in deep meditation or prayer. Others had been ground to pulp against the concrete and conveyed no expression at all.

To survive you must find yourself then it won't matter where you are.

Success is a dangerous element in any endeavor. Embrace the struggle. Beware the achievement. For it steals your caution even as it leads you down the next unknown pathway.