41
" 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. "
― Laurence Gonzales , Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
42
" 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. "
― Laurence Gonzales , Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
45
" 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. "
― Laurence Gonzales , Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
47
" 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. "
― Laurence Gonzales , Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
49
" 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. "
― Laurence Gonzales , Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why