We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed to a force much greater than themselves, which in this case is the wave, and submitted to the gnarly rigors of its discipline. They have allowed themselves to be shaped and polished by the sea. They have given themselves up to this greater force, day after day, year after year. Crushed and punished, battered into something tempered and resilient, and sharpened to an edge by constant refinement. They are warriors in the best sense: by bending to the often brutal demands of surfing they have transformed themselves into beings who can respond to great violence with grace and humility. And beauty. Peter Heller
About This Quote

Surfing is a sport where you can’t win, but you can lose. The only thing you can do when you lose is go home and learn from your mistake and try not to make it in the next heat. If you win in the next heat, then it’s all about winning again. As a surfer, there’s this constant pressure to keep trying.

No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep going out there and giving it everything you’ve got. You’ve got to keep fighting the wave until it finally breaks and hopefully even after that, you can still make some great turns, take some great photos or catch a perfect wave.

Source: Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, And Catching The Perfect Wave

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  1. Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

  2. I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

  3. There might not be a measure of happiness left in a life, but there could be beauty and grace and endless love.

  4. If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

  5. When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.

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