Sixty Meters to Anywhere Quotes

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“The thing I realize, though, the longer and longer I stay sober, is that the bigger injustice would not be a life cut short, or a life inside a prison. It would be living the sadly ordinary life of a career alcoholic, sitting on a barstool and telling the same stories to the same half-friends for years and years, spending all that money on just enough drinks to get into a cozy haze every night.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“Of course, when there’s nothing to do but sleep, you can’t sleep.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“It’s enjoyable, to come back to the safer, grounded world that you dreamed about escaping, and realizing that even if you burn your burritos, it’s a tiny worry compared to wondering if you’re going to get yourself and your buddy killed on some stupid rock in a canyon in Arizona.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“I had graduated from pointless shit like sitting on a barstool for hours at a time to pointless shit like crawling sideways across a meaningless rock face and wishing I could just get a few feet farther. It was exactly what I needed.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“I didn’t drink a couple of beers and chill out; I drank as hard as I could as long as I could. I didn’t have a cigarette every now and then; I smoked a pack a day, all of them right down to the butt. I didn’t take up jogging; I ran a marathon. I dive into everything, and the job gets done, even when it’s not a job. When I find a song I like, I play the shit out of it, over and over again, until, after two weeks, I can’t listen to it anymore.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“Most of the guys who worked in my department at REI climbed. They talked about it a lot, and I learned that the “rock” in “rock climbing” is silent if you know what you’re talking about.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“You wait at the curb for a bus or a friend with a car, and you light a cigarette, and maybe then you realize that no one told you what to do with the rest of your life.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“If I hadn’t quit drinking, yeah, maybe I’d be dead or in jail. But probably I’d just be missing out on an extraordinary life. And that would be a tragedy.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“Over the next three years, Mick and I would talk on and off about his drinking. To me, it hadn’t seemed like much, but I often remembered that night in the camper, how it seemed like something was missing. I told him maybe it would be a good idea to quit completely. He disagreed, saying he thought he could do it in moderation. It was a conversation I’d heard in my own head at age twenty-three, and one that I continued to have: I can control it. No, you can’t. Yes, I can. No, you can’t. At one point, Mick and I even argued. We let it get between us, and didn’t get together as often as we should have. Eventually, we both apologized, and things returned to normal. He quit drinking six weeks before he died. Things were going really well, his wife told me. Then one day, his heart just stopped. He was fifty-four.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“In addiction, just like climbing, you can’t fall off if you don’t let go.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“I wasn’t going to miss out on any of it, no matter how low or how high it got, just because, what, I wanted to remember what good beer tasted like, or how it made me feel? I’d have missed a life.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“That is the end of the fun phase of all addictions: maintenance.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“That was the day I started to try to forget all my memories with a person I loved. The day I started to adjust to a new part of my life, the part when I’m not in love anymore, the part where I’m alone.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“I’m from Iowa. We’re sensible people. We don’t go looking for new, crazy things in our late twenties. We”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“I hate camping. I wonder if there’s a way to do all this outdoor shit and not have to sleep in a tent. What’s the point of making yourself miserable to enjoy the outdoors? We could have just gotten up really early in the morning and driven here. No one can possibly get a good night’s sleep in these conditions. Maybe”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere