Best 23 quotes of Robyn Davidson on MyQuotes

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

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.

Camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not being or end: they mere change form.

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

I believe when you’re stuck in one spot for too long it’s best to throw a grenade where you stand, and jump…and pray.

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

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.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.

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

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

That odd idea that one person can go to a foreign part and in this rather odd voice describe it to the folks back home doesn't make much sense in the post-colonial world.

The 70s were a wonderful time to be young. I think most young people at that time were pushing the boundaries, asking all sorts of questions of society, of life and of themselves. They were very politicised. It was part of the air that we breathed.

The good Lord in his ultimate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable: hope, jokes, and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs.

The most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.

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.

The two things 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 endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.

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.

AAAAHHHHHHHhhhhh! WHOOSH, WHOOSH, YOU BASTARD!

And it was only then that I realized what I had let myself in for, and only then I realized how bloody thick I had been not to have predicted it. It would seem that the combination of elements--woman, desert, camels, aloneness--hit some soft sport in this era's passionless, heartless, aching psyche. It fired the imaginations of people who seem themselves as alienated, powerless, unable to do anything about a world gone mad. And wouldn't it be my luck to pick just this combination. The reaction was totally unexpected and it was very, very weird. I was now public property. I was now a kind of symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than all that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.

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.

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

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.

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.