Robyn Davidson Quotes

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

“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

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

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

“Desert time refused to structure itself. It preferred instead to flow in curlicues, vortices and tunnels, ...”

— Robyn Davidson

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

“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

“To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble.”

— Robyn Davidson

If I had any kind of creed in regard to living among strangers, it was this: once could criticize one's own place, indeed one had a duty to do so, but when crossing a cultural border one left behind judgements as to how life should be organized

— Robyn Davidson

“It is better to proceed with one's duty in the service of others than wallow in the pain attachments bring”

— Robyn Davidson

“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

“I could not get used to the idea of ther being classes of people inherently inferior to oneself, to whom one could be as odiously condescendign or downright brutal as one likes, yet with whom one lived as intimately as family.”

— Robyn Davidson

“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

“And I recognized then the process by which I had always attempted difficult things. I had simply not allowed myself to think of the consequences, but had closed my eyes, jumped in, and before I knew where I was, it was impossible to renege. I was basically a dreadful coward, I knew that about myself. The only way I could overcome this was to trick myself with that other self, who lived in dream and fantasy and who was annoyingly lackadaisical and unpractical. All passion, no sense, no order, no instinct for self-preservation. That's what I had done, and now that cowardly self had discovered an unburnt bridge by which to return to the past. As Renata Adler writes in Speedboat: I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”

— Robyn Davidson

“I had been sick of carrying around the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class.”

— Robyn Davidson

“I had rediscovered people in my past and come to terms with my feelings towards them. I had learnt what love was. That love wanted the best possible for those you cared for even if that excluded yourself. That before, I had wanted to possess people without loving them, and now I could love them and wish them the best without needing them.”

— Robyn Davidson

“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

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

“If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.
Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life's so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.”

— Robyn Davidson

“That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. 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 best of all I had learnt to laugh.”

— Robyn Davidson

“One of the questions we need to ask, if we are to have a future, she says, is "Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?" One answer is: when we were nomadic. "It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment.”

— Robyn Davidson

AAAAHHHHHHHhhhhh! WHOOSH, WHOOSH, YOU BASTARD!

— Robyn Davidson

“The desert is natural; when you are out there, you can get in tune with your environment, something you lose when you live in the city.”

— Robyn Davidson

“Camels are wonderful animals. Witty, intelligent and sensitive.”

— Robyn Davidson

“If you think of all the enduring stories in the world, they're of journeys. Whether it's 'Don Quixote' or 'Ulysses,' there's always this sense of a quest - of a person going away to be tested, and coming back.”

— Robyn Davidson

You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.

— Robyn Davidson

“The agricultural revolution transformed the earth and changed the fate of humanity. It produced an entirely new mode of subsistence, which remains the foundation of the global economy to this day.”

— Robyn Davidson

“I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.”

— Robyn Davidson

“Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.”

— Robyn Davidson

“The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel.”

— Robyn Davidson

“As we've lost this idea of pilgrimage, we've lost this idea of human beings walking for a very, very long time. It does change you.”

— Robyn Davidson

As you get older, you do just get tired.

— Robyn Davidson

“I am very lucky: not very many writers can say they genuinely like the film of their book. However, I do.”

— Robyn Davidson

“I think people are frightened by different things, so I don't see myself as particularly courageous.”

— Robyn Davidson

“I'd always loved writing, in the same way that I'd loved painting. I wouldn't have seen it as a career.”

— Robyn Davidson

“I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.”

— Robyn Davidson

“My sense of myself is that I was a rather unformed kind of person trying to make myself up out of bits of spit and string.”

— Robyn Davidson

Some of the best conversations I've had are sitting around a camp fire.

— Robyn Davidson

“Thank God for being a writer, because you do sort of find out what you think by the process of writing.”

— Robyn Davidson

“The romantic view would be that nomads are wonderful people, better than us; they care about the environment.”

— Robyn Davidson

“The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.”

— Robyn Davidson

“There are worse things than being called 'the camel lady,' I suppose.”

— Robyn Davidson

“These days I am ruled by doubt, and that is a difficult place to write from.”

— Robyn Davidson

“When I was young, I thought I wouldn't be a good mother. Now I think I would be, but I'm too long in the tooth.”

— Robyn Davidson

“In 10000 BC, all human beings were hunter-gatherers; by 1500 AD, 1 percent were hunter-gatherers. Less than .001 percent of people are hunter-gatherers today.”

— Robyn Davidson

“In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.”

— Robyn Davidson

“People who wander are nicer to be with. Movement militates against hoarding possessions and against bigotry, because you are constantly moving across boundaries and having to negotiate with people.”

— Robyn Davidson

By now I was utterly deprogrammed. I walked along naked usually, clothes being not only putrid but unnecessary. My skin had been baked a deep terra-cotta brown and was the constituency of harness leather. The sun no longer penetrated it. I retained my hat.

— Robyn Davidson

The 70s were a wonderful time to be young. I think most young people at that time were pushing the boundaries, asking all sorts of questions of society, of life and of themselves. They were very politicised. It was part of the air that we breathed.

— Robyn Davidson

“I hate hats! Hats just give you really bad hair! I had a hat sometimes. Frankly, you get burnt so much anyway, it's beside the point. And when you're walking into the western sun, no hat in the world is going to save your face and neck from being sizzled.”

— Robyn Davidson