Kira Salak

“What I've learned is that everything in life - and I mean, even the worst of it - can be turned into grace...the test is - for even one moment in our lives - not to strike back at something, no matter how bad it gets...when you're faced with the temptation to get angry or upset and to hit back - you just don't do it. You let the temptation roll over you and not touch you. The idea is not to add to the collective pain...and by not doing so, you make the world a better place.”
― Kira Salak, The White Mary

“I wonder what we look for when we embark on these kinds of trips. There is the pat answer that you tell the people you don't know: that you're interested in seeing a place, learning about its people. But then the trip begins and the hardship comes, and hardship is more honest: it tells us that we don't have enough patience yet, nor humility, nor gratitude. And we thought that we did. Hardship brings us closer to truth, and thus is more difficult to bear, but from it alone comes compassion. And so I've told the world that it can do what it wants with me during this trip if only, by the end, I have learned something more. A bargain then. The journey, my teacher.”
― Kira Salak, The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu