Wilderness Tips Quotes

Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

A tip from Lubitsch: 'Let the audience add up two plus two and they'll love you forever.

She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before.

Among wilderness survival tips, punching a wild animal in the face probably isn’t on a checklist.

The lock splits. The iron gate swings open. She emerges, raises her arms towards the suddenly chilled moon. The world changes.

Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.

Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.

She had loved him, uselessly.

Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

He can see the point of venison, of killing to eat, but to have a cut-off head on your wall? What does it prove, except that a deer can't pull a trigger?

Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.

She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.

What she read was a series of short connected lyrics, “Isis in Darkness.” The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love.

It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.

I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

The question at this age is what kind of dog you will shortly resemble. She will be a beagle, Prue a terrier. Pamela will be an Afghan, or something equally unearthly.

The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.

He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he'd like to be somebody else.

What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not.

[She] smiles, too, and eats and drinks, and is happy, and outside the kitchen window the wind blows and the world shifts and crumbles and rearranges itself, and time goes on.

Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.

Her life began to seem long. Her adrenalin was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.

Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn't there, it's nothing.

She was something of his own that he had lost.

He'd forgotten what delight felt like.

He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.

the wife was as old as her own mother, almost, and women like that did not really have lives.

Jane resented him for it, but she didn't blame him. Her mother inspired in almost everyone who encountered her a vicious desire for escape.

Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of mothers, the world of precautions, the world of burdens and fate and heavy female constraints upon the flesh. They wanted a life without consequences.

I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I'm thirty. She knows this absolutely. It's a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she'll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.

By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother’s account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That’s what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to the force of gravity.

Whatever are you making, Pa?” Laura asked, and he answered, “Wait and see.” He heated the tip of the poker red-hot in the stove, and carefully he burned black every alternate little square. “Curiosity killed a cat, Pa,” Laura said. “You look pretty healthy,” said Pa.

He held a knife against her breast, As into his arms she pressed, sang the girl. I could just leave, thought Richard. But he didn't want to do that. Oh Willy Willy, don't you murder me, I'm not prepared for eternity. Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?" George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they'd found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue.

Maybe I've remembered my whole life wrong," she told him. "Maybe I've been wrong about everyone.

Change and decay in all around I see," she said, smiling in a way he did not like at all. "I'm not prepared for eternity.

God knows," she says, "what I thought I was doing." She laughs, a rueful, puzzled laugh that is also indulgent.

She no longer knows what she wants from him.

Tell me something filthy. I hate love, don't you?

Fashion is like hunting," Kat told them, hoping to appeal to their male hormones, if any. "It's playful, it's intense, it's predatory. It's blood and guts. It's erotic.

She was like a child sleepwalking along a roof-ledge ten storeys up. He was afraid to call out in warning, in case she should wake, and fall.

The light only shines for some," she said, kindly and sadly. "And even for them it's not all the time. The rest of the time you're alone.

Up close her eyes were turquoise, the irises dark-ringed like a cat's.

She took pleasure from his furtive, boyish delight in his own wickedness.

Luckily she was not too beautiful; extreme beauty put people off.

She felt betrayed, bereft. Loss of face, the Japanese called it. They knew. She felt as though her face, so carefully prepared and nourished, had been ripped off.

This makes him feel sad. Sad, and too young. He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he'd like to be somebody else.

But then, I would lose power. Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

He gives a meditative chew or two. "How is it that you never got married--an attractive woman like you?

Diversity is resilience.

I am wilderness and madness made flesh. You are just a girl" –he smiled, and the tips of his teeth were sharp–"and I am the wolf in the woods.

From such an experience you would emerge reborn, or not at all.

He took her body seriously, which impressed her no end.

Something has changed, she has changed something, but she doesn’t yet know what.

She skims over the grief.

There is no sun at all, no moon; only the rustling northern lights, like electronic music, and the hard little stars.

This is no country for old men, she recites to herself. One of the poems she memorized, though it wasn’t on the final exam. Change that to old women.

But she knows other things, hidden things. Secrets. And these other things are older, and on some level more important. More fundamental. Closer to the bone.

The ultimate grade six insult, to be accused of loving someone.

She still had the narrative habit, she still wanted to know the ends of stories.

A line has been drawn and on the other side of it is the past, both darker and more brightly intense than the present.

It’s an old sound, a sound left over.

She has done an outrageous thing, but she doesn’t feel guilty. She feels light and peaceful and filled with charity, and temporarily without a name.

What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It’s that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness.

Then she was happy, sure of herself, her plain face almost luminous. She wanted to cause joy. at these times she was loved, at others merely trusted.

An interest in the clothing of the present is frivolity, an interest in the clothing of the past is archaeology.

But then, I would lose power. Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

Cheap, Donny's mother would say. It's an enticing word. Most of the things in his life are expensive, and not very interesting.

She lived with several men, but in each of the apartments there were always cardboard boxes, belonging to her, that she never got around to unpacking; just as well, because it was that much easier to move out. When she got past thirty she decided it might be nice to have a child, some time, later. She tried to figure out a way of doing this without becoming a mother.

She has inspected the ancient church: not a lot to see there. The stained-glass windows must have gone when the Presbyterians took over. Dead soldiers' names on the wall, as if God were interested.

Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is. She is in Lois’s apartment, in the holes that open inwards on the wall, not like windows but like doors. She is here. She is entirely alive.

But Molly didn't hate men. With men, Molly was a toad-kisser. she thought any toad could be turned into a prince if he was only kissed enough, by her. I was different. I knew a toad was a toad and would remain so. The thing was to find the most congenial among the toads and learn to appreciate their finer points. You had to develop an eye for warts. I called this compromise. Molly called it cynicism

For a moment, Julie feels this digging-up, this unearthing of him, as a desecration. Surely there should be boundaries set upon the wish to know, on knowledge merely for its own sake. This man is being invaded.

Dania gets huffy, and says that Kat's losing her job is a price for immoral behaviour in a previous life. Kat tells her to stuff it; anyway, she's done enough immoral behaviour in this life to account for the whole thing.

I don't really know why. Maybe I was waiting for the big romance. Maybe I wanted True Love, with the armpits airbrushed out and no bitter aftertaste. Maybe I wanted to keep my options open. In those days, I felt that anything could happen.

They angle towards her, breathing her in: she smells of hair spray, nail polish, something artificial and too sweet. Cheap, Danny's mother would say. It's an enticing word. Most of the things in his life are expensive, and not very interesting.

Hairball speaks to her, without words. It is irreducible, it has the texture of reality, it is not an image. What it tells her is everything she's never wanted to hear about herself. This is new knowledge, dark and precious and necessary. It cuts.

Jane sat with the tears running down her face. She felt desolate: left behind, stranded. Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all; but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

Nor is it Darce she wants, not really. What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It’s that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness. Everything Joanne herself does is surrounded by quotation marks.

He gazes into her eyes and lies with such tenderness, such heartfelt feeling, such implicit sadness at her want of faith in him, that she can't question him. To question him would turn her cynical and hard. She would rather be kissed; she would rather be cherished. She would rather believe.

She wishes she could go back a few decades, grow up again. The first time, she missed something; she missed a stage, or some vital information other people seemed to have. This time she would make different choices. She would be less obedient; she would not ask for permission. She would not say “I do” but “I am.

It’s love that does it to you,” Jane would reply, in the resigned, ponderous voice of her mother. “You wait and see, my girl. One of these days you’ll come down off your devil-may-care high horse.” As Jane said this, and even though she was making fun, she could picture love, with a capital L, descending out of the sky towards her like a huge foot. Her mother’s life had been a disaster, but in her own view an inevitable disaster, as in songs and movies. It was Love that was responsible, and in the face of Love, what could be done? Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat.

She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what is was. It was not peace: she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it's as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.

I was married once," I say, sadly, regretfully. I hope to convey that I did the right thing but it didn't work out. Some jerk let me down, in a way too horrible to go into. Charles is free to think he could have done better. There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

It's simple," Kat told them. "You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

You had sex, and love got made out of it whether you liked it or not. You woke up in a bed or more likely on a mattress, with an arm around you, and found yourself wondering what it might be like to keep on doing it. At that point Jane would start looking at her watch. She had no intention of being left in any lurches. She would do the leaving herself. And she did.)

Later, after she had flung herself into the current of opinion that had swollen to a river by the late sixties, she no longer said 'making love'; she said 'having sex.' But it amounted to the same thing. You had sex, and love got made out of it whether you liked it or not. You woke up in a bed or more likely on a mattress, with an arm around you, and found yourself wondering what it might be like to keep doing it.

He peeled the towel that imprisoned us away and let it fall. I felt it slide softly off my backside, and I felt, too, his rising excite¬ment, hard, erect, pressing against me. My nipples were erect, straining, aching, pressed against his strong warm damp chest, the tangle and pattern of his hair. He was a beast, an animal. My excitement was rising again, to match his. It was as if my heart were about to burst or to flip flop, breathless, into a dark abyss. “Of course, you are crazy, my darling, but, then, so am I.” He kissed me and his oh-so-clever hands seized my waist, tighten¬ing, and then sneaking up my backside, pulling me, pressing me closer, into him. He kissed me again, and his lips moved down my neck to my shoulder and then to my breasts. “Oh,” I said, “Oh.” He bent over me, kissing my collarbone and then my breasts, carefully, slowly, his hands traveling down my back, and over my backside; suddenly, he was on his knees, kissing the whorl of 101 my belly button; then he was forcing me open, gently, gently, his tongue exploring caressing, devouring … “Oh …” I exhaled a deep, shuddering breath. I tipped on the very edge. He bit me, gently. Oooooh! He pulled in the reins, the bit and bridle, of the frisky frothing filly that I had become; this sudden halt made me wilder, crazier; then, once again, he brought me, trembling, up to the very, very edge of the cliff – of orgasm, of loss of self. Then he pulled me back. I blinked and trembled. Around the two of us, there was a whole world, a whole universe. It seemed too vivid to be real, like the backdrop in an opera. Venus was brighter and lower now. The sky had turned deep indigo. One by one, stars appeared.

Molly and I had big ideas, then. We were going to change things. We were going to break the code, circumvent the old boys' network, show that women could do it, whatever it might be. We were going to take on the system, get better divorce settlements, root for equal pay. We wanted justice and fair play. We thought that was what the law was for. We were brave but we had it backwards. We didn't know you had to begin with the judges.

She did not think of him as having an existence apart from her: the wife and kids were just boring subsistence details, like brushing your teeth. Instead she saw him in glorious and noble isolation, a man singled out, like an astronaut, like a driver in a bell-jar, like a saint in a medieval painting, surrounded by a golden atmosphere of his own, a total-body halo. She wanted to be in there with him, participating in radiance, basking in his light.

It's love that does it to you," Jane would reply, in the resigned, ponderous voice of her mother. "You wait and see, my girl. One of these days you'll come down off your devil-maycare high horse." As Jane said this, and even though she was making fun, she could picture love, with a capital L, descending out of the sky towards her like a huge foot. Her mother's life had been a disaster, but in her own view an inevitable disaster, as in songs and movies. It was Love that was responsible, and in the face of Love, what could be done? Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat.

She looks across the line and sees the nine waitresses in their bathing suits, in the clear blazing sunlight, laughing on the dock, herself among them; and off in the shadowy rustling bushes of the shoreline, sex lurking dangerously. It had been dangerous, then. It had been sin. Forbidden, secret, sullying. Sick with desire. Three dots had expressed it perfectly, because there had been no ordinary words for it. On the other hand there had been marriage, which meant wifely checked aprons, playpens, a sugary safety. But nothing has turned out that way. Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

She'd shaved off most of her hair, worked on the drop-dead stare, perfected a certain turn of the neck that conveyed an aloof inner authority. What you had to make them believe was that you knew something they didn't know yet. What you also had to make them believe was that they too could know this thing, this thing that would give them eminence and power and sexual allure, that would attract envy to them-- but for a price. The price of the magazine. What they could never get through their heads was that it was done entirely with cameras. Frozen light, frozen time. Given the angle, she could make any woman look ugly. Any man as well. She could make anyone look beautiful, or at least interesting. It was all photography, it was all iconography. It was all in the choosing eye. This was the thing that could never be bought, no matter how much of your pitiful monthly wage you blew on snakeskin.

Chapman, G.D. The Five Love Languages (Moody Press, 2015) DeMarco, M.J. The Millionaire Fastlane (Viperion Publishing, 2011) Dunn, J. The SoulMate Experience (A Higher Possibility, first edition, 2011) Goldsmith, M. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People become even more successful (Profile Books, 2008) Gottman, J.M. The Seven Principles For Making a Marriage Work (Orion, 2007) Harv Eker, T. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (Piatkus, 2007) Hill, N., Think and Grow Rich (Wilder Publications, 2007) Kelly, M. The Rhythm of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2006) Pavlina, S., Personal Development for Smart People (Hay House, 2009) Ramsey, D. Total Money Makeover (Thomas Nelson Publishers, reprint edition, 2013) Stevenson, S. Sleep Smarter: 21 Proven Tips to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success. (Model House Publishing, 2014) Tracy, B. Eat That Frog! (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007) Whitsett, D. The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer (McGraw Hill, 1998). Williamson, M. A Return To Love (Thorsons, 1996)

Isis in Darkness, he writes. The Genesis. It exalts him simply to form the words. He will exist for her at last, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all. It will not be what he once wanted: not Osiris, not a blue-eyed god with burning wings. His are humbler metaphors. He will only be the archaeologist; not part of the main story, but the one who stumbles upon it afterwards, making his way for his own obscure and battered reasons through the jungle, over the mountains, across the desert, until he discovers at last the pillaged and abandoned temple. In the ruined sanctuary, in the moonlight, he will find the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Underworld lying in shattered white marble on the floor. He is the one who will sift through the rubble, groping for the shape of the past. He is the one who will say it has meaning. That too is a calling, that also can be a fate. He picks up a filing-card, jots a small footnote on it in his careful writing, and replaces it neatly in the mosaic of paper he is making across his desk. His eyes hurt. He closes them and rests his forehead on his two fisted hands, summoning up whatever is left of his knowledge and skill, kneeling beside her in the darkness, fitting her broken pieces back together.