Pct Quotes

My body was smarter than I was. I was with someone who would never hurt me, and so I finally relaxed. ~ Aspen Matis

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The PCT had taught me what a mile was. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I'd made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I'd been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn't prepare me for what would happen next. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn't think I could do that. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I'd always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I'd ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer. ~ Aspen Matis

I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. "It's a pocketknife," I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I'd snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, "The truck works."

And so it did. ~ Aspen Matis

The freedom of the woods lingered in me here; I felt lighter. I hoped to be changed by it, allow this seeding independence to root in my childhood Eden's soil and grow until at last it was undeniable. ~ Aspen Matis

The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire. ~ Aspen Matis

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. ~ Aspen Matis

She was my mirror image, slightly distorted, flipped, older, larger, more able to coexist with a pack of men. I'd be their pawn. She was their queen. ~ Aspen Matis

And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way. ~ Aspen Matis

I knew with certainty now - I could say no, and he would stop. Above all, I felt the fierce beauty of the choice. I knew now what it was that had held me from falling into my desire to be with him fully: I first needed to make sure he was a man who would respect my 'No. ~ Aspen Matis

Happy people have everything to give. ~ Aspen Matis

I walked home holding Tom's hand, not letting it go even as he tottered across a soccer field where there was nothing that could hurt him. ~ Aspen Matis

It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction. ~ Aspen Matis

I don't remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me.
I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me.

I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father's faith in my walk - in me - made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, "She's an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn't mean she's not selfish." He almost understood. ~ 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. ~ Aspen Matis

There were so many other amazing things in this world. They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I've been eating this shit for so long that I've transcended the need to actually enjoy my food. No more desires. Eat to live, not live to eat. ~ Carrot Quinn

Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless.

But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it. ~ Aspen Matis

For all my life, I had been passive when faced with dangers. I was stunned as I swam to find that I had, for the first time in my history, asserted myself and been truly heard - respected. It felt monumental, I was buzzing with adrenaline. It was as if I'd become someone else entirely.

I had escaped a kidnapper. It finally felt real. My body unclenched tension in the balmy pool.

I was proud of the strength I'd found. I was the one who asserted he take me back; I caused him to listen. I was no longer a passive Doll Girl, trapped. This was me learning I could trust my voice - I'd used it, and it finally worked! I was triumphant. This escape showed me: I had grown, and grown vividly. ~ Aspen Matis

I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen. ~ Aspen Matis

She taught me only how to need to be taken care of.

I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions - to earn my own trust. ~ Aspen Matis

In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People's cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened. ~ Aspen Matis

I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it. ~ Aspen Matis

I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Leaving Paul and destroying our marriage and life as I knew it for the simple and inexplicable reason that I felt I had to - that had been hard as well. But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I walked, floated, lighter - forty miles, my biggest day yet. I'd lifted the burden of guilt and shame off my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self - forgiveness for my innocence. ~ Aspen Matis

After all this time questioning whether I could trust myself, my instinct had proven right - I'd found a path in pathless woods. ~ Aspen Matis

My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child. ~ Aspen Matis

Second - I'd take much better care of myself.

There were simple things I could do. I could start with my poor feet. These little two feet carried me each day for miles and miles, steady and flexed, tired and aching from constant daily pounding, bruised scratched and sometimes rubbed red-raw, my weight pressing and pressing them. I decided now that each night in my tent I'd massage them. I would knead them with lotion because they always ached, and at the end of thirty-mile days they burned - and it would be luxurious - something I could have done the entire way because I had been carrying sun lotion but had never taken the ten sacred minutes to do for myself. ~ Aspen Matis

The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape - my word. The subsequent silencing and exile - misplaced shame - were the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong - to my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able - so they could finally know that I was strong.

Instead I had shown myself.

And it felt wonderful. ~ Aspen Matis

I once thought that the Pacific Crest Trail Association used these trail registers to track the progress of individual thru-hikers and make sure that they are not cheating by skipping parts of the PCT. But I learned that is not true. The main purpose of the trail registers was to show me how many people were in front of me so that I could feel slow and inadequate. But I could also learn the names of the people that I would pass so that I could freak them out by calling them by their trail name before they could tell me what it is. Some people write witty things in trail registers, like "Out of food. Stalked by bear. For the love of God please help me." I get a lot of laughs from reading trail registers. When ~ Libby Zangle

So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The entire time, he'd only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn't the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn't have heard me. He'd never responded, not by stopping, not with his words. ~ Aspen Matis

Most of the people I met on the PCT passed only briefly through my life, but I was enriched by each of them. They made me laugh they made me think, they made me go on another day, and most of all, they made me trust entirely in the kindness of strangers. ~ Cheryl Strayed

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. ~ Cheryl Strayed

My beauty and independence were new for me. They brought me pride and satisfaction; they changed my sense of possibility. I felt awake in my body. Living in the woods, building my little shelter each night, a silent shadow, drifting in and out of mountain towns, a ghost, I was entirely self-reliant. On the trail I had persisted despite fear, and walking the Pacific Crest had led me deeply into happiness. I felt amazing now. In this body that brought me twelve hundred miles, I felt I could do anything. ~ Aspen Matis

I was passive by nature. I had always been. Arguing felt unnatural and uncomfortable. I was always agreeing even when I didn't really, instinctively looking for ways to forfeit power, to become more dependent, to be taken care of. I realized how intensely Icecap reminded me of Jacob. They were similar, both diligent and harsh in their judgments - and my big brother's sureness had always comforted me.

But as I ran on sore legs to keep up with Icecap, my tendency toward silence stressed me. ~ Aspen Matis

The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it. ~ Aspen Matis

I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.

I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself. ~ Aspen Matis

If I wanted to go to bed at ten o'clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.

When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I'd listen to Blood On The Tracks. ~ Aspen Matis

I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love. ~ Aspen Matis

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Though I was starved for contact, I didn't stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other. ~ Aspen Matis