“It seems to me that the good lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.”

Robyn Davidson is most famous as the author of “Tracks”, the story of her Australian odyssey, traversing 1,700 miles of outback with only her dog and camels for company. A movie was released about this story in 2013, starring Mia Wasikowska. I highly recommend both the book and the movie (in that order). Robyn is a very gifted and insightful writer whose career has spanned 30 years. I decided to include her words today as the Saturday Life 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.”

“And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them ”

“Real travel would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another’s eyes”

“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.”

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

“Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.”

“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.”

“When I die, this is the only gold that will go with me. What does one take after death? Just one’s good deeds and the love of others.”