Robyn Davidson Quotes

If I had any kind of creed in regard to living among strangers, it was this: once could criticize one's own place, indeed one had a duty to do so, but when crossing a cultural border one left behind judgements as to how life should be organized

I don't want to be bored; I don't want to be with someone I don't respect.

The question I'm most commonly asked is "Why?" A more pertinent question might be, why is it that more people don't attempt to escape the limitations imposed upon them? If Tracks has a message at all, it is that one can be awake to the demand for obedience that seems natural simply because it is familiar. Wherever there is pressure to conform (one person's conformity is often in the interests of another person's power), there is a requirement to resist. Of course I did not mean that people should drop what they were doing and head for the wilder places, certainly not that they should copy what I did. I meant that one can choose adventure in the most ordinary of circumstances. Adventure of the mind, or to use an old-fashioned word, the spirit.

I had been sick of carrying around the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class.

Australia's arid western region, from the town of Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, is a beautiful, haunting, but largely empty land. Dominated by the harsh, almost uninhabited Great Sandy and Gibson deserts, the region is known only to Australian Aborigines, a handful of white settlers, and the few travelers who motor across it.

If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.
Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life's so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.

My sense of myself is that I was a rather unformed kind of person trying to make myself up out of bits of spit and string.

By now I was utterly deprogrammed. I walked along naked usually, clothes being not only putrid but unnecessary. My skin had been baked a deep terra-cotta brown and was the constituency of harness leather. The sun no longer penetrated it. I retained my hat.

That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and best of all I had learnt to laugh.

And here I was at the end of my trip, with everything just as fuzzy and unreal as the beginning. It was easier for me to see myself in Rick's lens, riding down to the beach in that cliched sunset, just as it was easier for me to stand with my friends and wave goodbye to the loopy woman with the camels, the itching smell of the dust around us, and in our eyes the feat that we had left so much unsaid. There was an unpronounceable joy and an aching sadness to it. It had all happened too suddenly. I didn't believe this was the end at all. There must be some mistake. Someone had just robbed me of a couple of month in there somewhere. There was not so much an anticlimactic quality about the arrival at the ocean, as the overwhelming feeling that I had somehow misplaced the penultimate scene.

The idea of finding things out, I hope that will stay with me until I drop.

You have to remember that I was an Australian girl of the Fifties and Sixties. For Australians at that time, it was imperative to get out of the country and discover the world.

Whilst in Pipalyatjara, I learnt that the Pitjantjara people were trying to have their land turned from leasehold to freehold. The attitude of the elders at first had been to dismiss the whole question. As far as they were concerned they didn't own the land, the land owned them. Their belief was that the earth was traversed in the dream-time by ancestral beings who had supernatural energy and power. These beings were biologically different from contemporary man, some being a synthesis of man and animal, plant, or forces such as fire or water...

I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space.

These days I am ruled by doubt, and that is a difficult place to write from.

In 10000 BC, all human beings were hunter-gatherers; by 1500 AD, 1 percent were hunter-gatherers. Less than .001 percent of people are hunter-gatherers today.

And so back up the ravines to the comfortable places (the sane ones?) where we don't have to think too much. Where life is, after all, just 'getting by' and where we survive, half asleep.

Real travel would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another's eyes

I am very lucky: not very many writers can say they genuinely like the film of their book. However, I do.

I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back.

resort. Yes, exactly, only now, after all this time, I had discovered that the grenade was a dud, and I could hop right back to that same old spot which was safety. The excruciating thing was that those two selves were now warring with each other. I wanted desperately to find those camels, and I wanted desperately not to find them. The pilot snapped me back to the present dilemma. 'Well, what do you want to do? Shall

London sort of wore me down. I can't cope with the winters!

After thirty years of being 'the camel lady,' believe me: One becomes inured to the spotlight.

The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel.

I believe the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up. So

To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and

It is better to proceed with one's duty in the service of others than wallow in the pain attachments bring

In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. 'Watch out, be careful, watch.' 'Don't climb trees, don't dirty your dress, don't accept lifts from strange men. Listen but don't learn, you won't need it.' And so the snail's antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness. And

I hate hats! Hats just give you really bad hair! I had a hat sometimes. Frankly, you get burnt so much anyway, it's beside the point. And when you're walking into the western sun, no hat in the world is going to save your face and neck from being sizzled.

One of the questions we need to ask, if we are to have a future, she says, is "Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?" One answer is: when we were nomadic. "It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment.

Thank God for being a writer, because you do sort of find out what you think by the process of writing.

When there is no one to remind you what society's rules are, and there is nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes.

At the age of 25, I gave up my study of Japanese language and culture at university in Brisbane and moved to the town of Alice Springs.

You can trick yourself into doing things by doing it one step at a time and never letting yourself see the overall picture.

Never, never have a famous partner. It's too complicated.

My thoughts can sometimes be spurred by what I read, but my reading is extremely eclectic.

Life's the adventure. You don't have to drop your bundle and go bush. It's about being brave within the context that you're in.

It is always interesting being on films sets - I have done it before with other actor friends - and I just find it fascinating. I just love that collaborative film family that develops around a project.

I could not get used to the idea of ther being classes of people inherently inferior to oneself, to whom one could be as odiously condescendign or downright brutal as one likes, yet with whom one lived as intimately as family.

I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.

In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, 'This is a rock,' I could now say, 'This is part of a net,' or closer, 'This, which everything acts upon, acts.' When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself stretched out for ever.

If you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt.

I made lists of lists of lists, then started all over again. And if I did something that wasn't on a list, I would promptly write it on one and cross it out, with the feeling of having at least accomplished something.

The discomfort I felt under that moral pressure has stayed with me all my life and made me eternally wary of the blindness of ideological certainty.

I've chosen difficult men. But then I'm sure they'd say they'd chosen a difficult woman.

I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.

Why did people circle one another, consumed with either fear or envy, when all the they were fearing or envying was illusion? Why did they build psychological fortresses and barriers around themselves that would take a Ph.D. in safe-cracking to get through, which even they could not penetrate from the inside? And once again I compared European society with Aboriginal. The one so archetypally paranoid, grasping, destructive, the other so sane. I didn't want ever to leave this desert. I knew that I would forget.

Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it.

And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them

Some of us just don't want to be famous ... anonymity cannot be bought for any price, once you have lost it ...

I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that's becoming a very precious and rare commodity.

Camels are still trained in Alice Springs for tourist jaunts and for occasional sale to Australia's zoos.

Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.

To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble.

Some instinct - and I think it was a correct one - led me to do something difficult enough to give my life meaning.

One continues to learn things in life, then promptly forget them.

Some of the best conversations I've had are sitting around a camp fire.

Of course, in India, I always said, 'Oh yes, I'm married.'

So I had made a decision which carried with it things that I could not articulate at the time. I had made the choice instinctively, and only later had given it meaning. The trip had never been billed in my mind as an adventure in the sense of something to be proved. And it struck me then that the most difficult things has been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity
and the fears were paper tigers. One really could do anything one had decided to do whether it were changing a job, moving to a new place, divorcing a husband or whatever,m one really cold act to change and control one's life;and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.

When I die, this is the only gold that will go with me. What does one take after death? Just one's good deeds and the love of others.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns - small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence - and lasted about ten seconds.

That arrogance of youth and that kind of ignorant confidence can get you through a whole lot of things, and then life does its stuff, and you get smashed around and beaten up. You get full of doubts, and you end up making a person out of those bits and pieces.

And I recognized then the process by which I had always attempted difficult things. I had simply not allowed myself to think of the consequences, but had closed my eyes, jumped in, and before I knew where I was, it was impossible to renege. I was basically a dreadful coward, I knew that about myself. The only way I could overcome this was to trick myself with that other self, who lived in dream and fantasy and who was annoyingly lackadaisical and unpractical. All passion, no sense, no order, no instinct for self-preservation. That's what I had done, and now that cowardly self had discovered an unburnt bridge by which to return to the past. As Renata Adler writes in Speedboat: I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

I had to learn how to be cheerful in the face of adversity

As you get older, you do just get tired.

I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.

And so I pushed it all down into the dim recesses of my mind, there to fester and grow like botulism.

Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.

When 'Tracks' first came out, I was courted by Sydney Pollack. I had lunch with him, and he opened the conversation with, 'Honey, you ain't gonna like what I'm gonna do to your book.' I really liked him, but I turned him down, because - well, I was stupid. I also turned down a great deal of money.

Desert time refused to structure itself. It preferred instead to flow in curlicues, vortices and tunnels, ...

I think a lot of writers are unrealistic about having their books translated into film.

The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

The desert is natural; when you are out there, you can get in tune with your environment, something you lose when you live in the city.