Rick > Rick's Quotes

“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”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks

“I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback

“Camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not being or end: they mere change form.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“I liked myself this way, it was such a relief to be free of disguises an prettiness and attractiveness. Above all that horrible, false, debilitating attractiveness that women hide behind. I puled my hat down over my ears so that they stuck out beneath it. 'I must remember this whn I get back. I must not fall into that trap again.' I must let people see me as I am. Like this? Yes, why not like this. But then I realized hat the rules pertaining to one set of circumstances do not necessarily pertain to another. Back there, this would just be another disguise. Back there, there was no nakedness, no one could afford it. Everyone had their social personae well fortified...”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“...desert time refused to structure itself. It preferred instead to flow in curlicues, vortices and tunnels,...”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback

“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.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback

“FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS Eddie and I walked together, we played charades trying to communicate and fell into fits of hysteria at each other’s antics. We stalked rabbits and missed, picked bush foods and generally had a good time. He was sheer pleasure to be with, exuding all those qualities typical of old Aboriginal people — strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness, a substantiality that immediately commanded respect.”
― Robyn Davidson, Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback