Laurence Gonzales Quotes & Sayings

Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion. — Laurence Gonzales

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

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

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

Who had thought she was having — Laurence Gonzales

Count your blessings. Be grateful
you're alive — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

To survive you must surrender without giving in, that is to say, fully accept the reality in all its horror and never give up the will to survive. That allows you to quickly adapt to the situation and dedicate yourself to the present moment rather than wallow in denial. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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

Success is a dangerous element in any endeavor. Embrace the struggle. Beware the achievement. For it steals your caution even as it leads you down the next unknown pathway. — Laurence Gonzales

To survive you must find yourself then it won't matter where you are. — Laurence Gonzales

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) — Laurence Gonzales

Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. You're going to die when you're supposed to die. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

The summit is not the only place on the mountain. — Laurence Gonzales

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 — Laurence Gonzales

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

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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

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

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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

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. — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales

Gravity is on duty all of the time. — Laurence Gonzales

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, — Laurence Gonzales

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. — Laurence Gonzales