Laurence Gonzales Quotes

Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.

The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.

To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.

We don't understand the power of nature and the world because we don't live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.

The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.

The summit is not the only place on the mountain.

The sun beams are always there. The trick is in seeing them.

But what is the way forward? I know what it isn't. It's not, as we once believed, plenty to eat and a home with all the modern conveniences. It's not a 2,000-mile-long wall to keep Mexicans out or more accurate weapons to kill them. It's not a better low-fat meal or a faster computer speed. It's not a deodorant, a car, a soft drink, a skin cream. The way forward is found on a path through the wilderness of the head and heart---reason and emotion. Thinking, knowing, understanding.

What does brace mean, anyway? Brace. Such an odd word. It comes from the Latin brachium, meaning arm. It means, as its heart, to embrace. It was a hug. A hug good-bye.

To survive, you must develop secondary emotions that function in a strategic balance with reason.

To lose everything at such a glorious eternity is far sweeter than to win by plodding through a cautious, painless, featureless life.

I am constantly surrounded by a display of natural wonders...It is beauty surrounded by ugly fear. I write in my log that it's a view of heaven from a seat in hell. (survivor after 53 days at sea)

With the illusion that we have dominion over the earth we conclude we have nothing to fear.

Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion.

We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.

Shit happens, and if we just want to restrict ourselves to things where shit can't happen... we're not going to do anything very interesting.

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.

The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it’s not what’s in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It’s not even what’s in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it’s what’s in your heart.

The world we imagine seems as real as the ones we’ve experienced. We suffuse the model with the emotional values of past realities. And in the thrall of that vision (call it “the plan,” writ large), we go forth and take action. If things don’t go according to the plan, revising such a robust model may be difficult. In an environment that has high objective hazards, the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk. In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too.

Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die.

Only 10 to 20 percent of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency.

On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use.

Knowledge of the sort you need does not begin with information, it begins with experience and perception. But there is a dark and twisty road from experience and perception to correct action.

Whether a deity is actually listening or not, there is value in formally announcing your needs, desires, worries, sins, and goals in a focused, prayerful attitude. Only when you are aware can you take action.

It’s like an Irish family. They fight like hell among themselves. They want nothing to do with each other. But you throw a disaster at them, and they’re all shoulder to shoulder and they’ll do whatever it takes. They don’t stop for one minute to think what their personal cost or toll is going to be in it, they just do it.

Helping someone else is the best way to ensure your own survival. It takes you out of yourself. It helps you to rise above your fears. Now you’re a rescuer, not a victim. And seeing how your leadership and skill buoy others up gives you more focus and energy to persevere. The cycle reinforces itself: You buoy them up, and their response buoys you up. Many people who survive alone report that they were doing it for someone else (a wife, boyfriend, mother, son) back home.

The perfect adventure shouldn’t be that much more hazardous in a real sense than ordinary life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break. We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer. Better to take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information, and then go forward in the knowledge that we’ve done everything we can. No,

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

Empathy is an important quality for a survivor. Kiley’s desire to aid Meg may have helped her feel less like a victim. It may have given her at least some sense of personal power.

If you find yourself in enough trouble to be staring death in the face, you’ve gotten there by a well-worn path.

Rigid people are dangerous people.

Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation.

He listened to a fire fighter tell of a woman he had found strapped into her seat, screaming. When he cut the seat belt, she fell apart. She was being held together by the seat belt. She died at his feet.

(Psychologists have observed that one of the most basic human needs, beginning at birth, is to be gazed upon by another. Mothers throughout the world have been observed spending long periods staring into the eyes of their babies with a characteristic tilt of the head. To be seen is to be real, and without another to gaze upon us, we are nothing. Part of the terror of being lost stems from the idea of never being seen again.)

As he walked along the runway, he came upon a United Airlines pilot. “He tried to sit up,” Martz said. “I saw a huge triangular hole in his forehead and I told him to just lie still and that help was on the way, but it was too late for him.

The true survivor isn’t someone with nothing to lose. He has something precious to lose. But at the same time, he’s willing to bet it all on himself. And it makes what he has that much richer. Days stolen are always sweeter than days given.

He saw at least a dozen people still in their seats. Their clothes were torn or blown or burned from their bodies, “completely naked in front, missing limbs, missing faces, some breathing, some moaning, and others just deader than a door nail.

I’m a secular priest ordained by training, experience, and, most important, the willingness to accept the mantle of command. That willingness encompasses the realization that failure is easy, and such failure could kill me or, worse, kill someone else.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, a young police officer named Pat McCann, who happened to be training at the airport that day, saw a man who had managed to get the upper half of his body through his window before the lower half was incinerated inside the plane.

I’d go to his classes so that I’d be able to speak his language, the language of science. When he took the podium, he always began by saying, “Fellow students…” He taught me the humility of knowing that we were all, always, students, and that to stop being a student was to stop living. When

Plan the flight and fly the plan. But don’t fall in love with the plan. Be open to a changing world and let go of the plan when necessary so that you can make a new plan. Then, as the world and the plan both go through their book of changes, you will always be ready to do the next right thing.

Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder

He passed the dead in all their ranks, in all their spectral attitudes. Some lay supine, mouths open in attitudes of near ecstasy, one upon the next, embracing. Some had bowed their heads as if in deep meditation or prayer. Others had been ground to pulp against the concrete and conveyed no expression at all.

the brain reads the state of the body and makes fine adjustments, even while it reads the environment and directs the body in reacting to it. In addition, that process continually reshapes the brain by making new connections. All of this is aimed at one thing only: adaptation, which is another word for survival.

Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.

The Rules of Life. The first rule we came up with was: Be here now. It’s a good survival rule. It means to pay attention and keep an up-to-date mental model. The second rule was: Everything takes eight times as long as it’s supposed to. That was the friction rule, which travelers in the wilderness will do well to heed.

Palmer had reached the field so fast that not all of the mortally wounded had died. “That’s one of the problems we had,” he said. “We were sitting there waiting for it, so they didn’t have that time to die.” For example, Palmer came upon a man who was lying on the runway. “He basically had both legs and both arms amputated. He asked me, ‘Am I gonna live?’ ” Palmer told him, “We’re gonna do what we can for you,” but he knew that he could not save the man.

CHARLES PERROW is a sociologist known for studying industrial accidents, such as those that occur with nuclear power plants, airlines, and shipping. In Normal Accidents, he wrote that “We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction.

the firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions. And while all this might seem of purely academic interest, it could prove helpful when your partner breaks his leg at 19,000 feet in a blizzard on a Peruvian mountain. It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They’re afraid, too, but they’re not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, said, “Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your

Yankovich explained the most salient points: “You’re at a quarter mile and someone asks you who your mother is: you don’t know. That’s how focused you are. Okay, call the ball. Now it’s a knife fight in a phone booth. And remember: full power in the wire. Your IQ rolls back to that of an ape.” It sounds as if he’s being a smart-ass (he is), but deep lessons also are there to be teased out like some obscure Talmudic script. Lessons about survival, about what you need to know and what you don’t need to know. About the surface of the brain and its deep recesses. About what you know that you don’t know you know and about what you don’t know that you’d better not think you know. Call it an ape, call it a horse, as Plato did. Plato understood that emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion. That turns out to be remarkably close to what modern research has begun to show us, and it works both ways: The intellect without the emotions is like the jockey without the horse.

who had thought she was having

SYROTUCK ANALYZED 229 search and rescue cases (11 percent of them fatal) and concluded that almost three quarters of those who died perished within the first forty-eight hours of becoming lost.

Still, she was doing her best, struggling to think like a survivor. When she found that the seaweed with which they’d covered themselves sustained a vast number of tiny creatures, “I was dazzled by the life it supported…an entire world, self-sufficient and complete.” To be open to the world in which you find yourself, to be able to experience wonder at its magnificence, is to begin to admit its reality and adapt to it. Be here now. It is to place yourself in relation to it, to say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still. To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe. A survival emergency is a Rorschach test. It will quickly tell you who you are.

Christopher Burney, the British officer who was held in Buchenwald and other German prison camps, was kept in solitary confinement for years during World War II. At first, he told himself he’d be out by Christmas. When Christmas passed, he hoped to be released by Easter. When that, too, passed and summer came, “I dismissed my old impatience from my mind,” he wrote in Solitary Confinement, “seeing such promise in the summer weather that no reservation, with its hidden pessimism, was now necessary…I could be patient for three more months.” That is the way a survivor thinks. When I was working in maximum-security prisons in the early 1980s, I remember one convict telling me, “I could do a nickel standing on my head.” When I asked how he did it, he said, “You got to stay inside yo’ mine.” That’s survivor thinking.

Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death.

emotions are a nuisance during business hours, and all his hours are business hours.

Days stolen are always sweeter than days given.

Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.

Such accidents have to happen. But they don’t have to happen to you and me.

The environment we’re used to is designed to sustain us. We live like fish in an aquarium. Food comes mysteriously down, oxygen bubbles up. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization. Then we go into nature, where we are least among equals with all other creatures. There we are put to the test. Most of us sleep through the test. We get in and out and never know what might have been demanded. Such an experience can make us even more vulnerable, for we come away with the illusion of growing hardy, salty, knowledgeable: Been there, done that.

The rigid person is a disciple of death; The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life.

Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch

the Zen concept of the beginner’s mind, the mind that remains open and ready despite years of training. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind there are few.

Logic doesn’t work well for such nonlinear systems as chess and life.

Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. It was

Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

Only 10 to 20 percent of people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They

Shit does just happen sometimes, as the bumper sticker says. There are things you can’t control, so you’d better know how you’re going to react to them.

the pilots on the Carl Vinson rarely talked earnestly about the risk this close to flight time. They joked about it instead. Because if you let yourself get too serious, you will get too scared, and once that devil is out of the bottle, you’re on a runaway horse. Fear is good. Too much fear is not.

only those who get it get it. A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales.

Until I realized that I was asking myself the wrong question. I was asking myself, Why me?” She gradually realized that she could ask a different question: What do I do as a result of having had that experience? “That was the big shift: What now?” She became almost breathless as she tried to explain the changes she experienced once she had shifted from “Why me?” to “What now?

So with the land we covered. Now, as we accelerated above it, touching it but lightly, it was soft as angora. But if my motion was disturbed, then this delicious frothy blanket would erupt into a thousand shards of rock and scalding sand, and all would resolve at once into the harsh reality of this lifeless lake. That's what falling was all about. Riding was transcendental; it was rolling the karmic wheel in order to ascend with angels out of the temporal hell of the flesh. Falling was to reenter the world as it was, the low world. Falling, we were all fallen angels. Hence, the treachery of our expedition was in essence the same as Satan's. Early bikers understood this concept and had named themselves accordingly.

Heaven and earth are inhumane; they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs.

Severe trauma explodes the cohesion of consciousness.

It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They’re afraid, too, but they’re not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, said, “Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn you down.” And Tyson himself said that fear was “like a snap, a little snap of light I get when I fight. I love that feeling. It makes me feel secure and confident, it suddenly makes everything explosive. It’s like: ‘Here it comes again. Here’s my buddy today.’” It’s a dangerous place to be, too. Control can easily slip away, as Tyson’s unusual behavior will attest.

I got to the point where nearly every flight was almost pure joy. I say almost because, even today, there is the residual anxiety before each flight, the knot in the stomach, that tells me I’m not a fool, that I know I’m taking a calculated risk in pitting my skill and control against a complex, tightly coupled, unstable system with a lot of energy in it. I’ll always be the tiny jockey on a half-ton of hair-trigger muscle. Fear puts me in my place. It gives me the humility to see things as they are. I get the same feeling before I go rock climbing or surfing or before I slap on my snowboard and plunge off into a backcountry wilderness that could swallow me up and not spit me out again.

Of each particular thing, ask: “What is it in itself, in its own construction?” —Marcus Aurelius

I cast myself across the land in search of enlightenment, and here is what I found: that matter and energy are one continuous flow. Nothing remains except the process. And that matter is so full of energy that it sometimes has to get right up and dance. And when it does, we call it life.

How, I wondered, can we wake up for this amazing journey that is so quickly ended? How can we experience the live performance of our own lives? To be in the moment is the ultimate act of redemption. To live with an unquenchable curiosity that sweeps away our mental models and makes everything new is the ultimate triumph we can experience as humans before inexorable forces pull us apart. And it also seems to offer the hope that we might grow up and out of our ape ancestry and into a state where we can live truly examined lives. A truly examined life would be one that gives a gift to the future. It would create the possibility, if not the certainty, that my grandchildren and yours might live as well as we have lived.

It’s the nature of our society that I’m considered unworthy of huge financial reward for that risk. But what can be earned is a certain nobility—not in the sense of aristocratic status but in the sense of striving for quality and dignity of behavior and living.

Once the stage of psychological disintegration is reached, death is often not far away,” John Leach writes in Survival Psychology. “[T]he ability people possess to die gently, and often suddenly, through no organic cause, is a very real one.

As an eminent neuroscientist, Damasio is as qualified as anyone to define the brain, and he calls it an “‘organ’ of information and government.