Lucy Walker Quotes

Taking risks is not being suicidal. Otherwise, skydivers need serious help.

I'm not insane, sir. I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.

I think extreme sports are really good for relieving stress.

I grew up doing a lot of extreme sports.

When given age-appropriate challenges, children tend to take them very seriously; in fact, the more obvious the risk is, the more cautiously a child will proceed.

Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.

Every moment in life can be interpreted as a risk, depending on our outlook - and level of obsessive- compulsive disorder! I do my best to depend on my gut. If you sit with a decision long enough, your gut/soul will tell you what path to take.

My wife says I have a frontal lobe issue. Your frontal lobe controls your danger response, like, 'Whoa, I shouldn't be doing this.'

In sports, especially skiing, you have to be comfortable with risk. You have to have a relationship with fear, and it can't dominate the decision-making process.

We gauge risk literally hundreds of times per day, usually well and often subconsciously. We start assessing risk before the disaster even happens. We are doing is right now. We decide where to live and what kind of insurance to buy, just like we process all kinds of everyday risks: we wear bike helmets, or not. We buckle our seatbelts, smoke cigarettes, and let our kids stay out until midnight. Or not.

Extreme sport has only ever been about goals and the ways to achieve these goals. Adrenaline plays a part, but it's never in the foreground.

I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.

Sometimes I think we can tell how important it is to risk by how dangerous it is to do so.

If you jump out of a plane without a parachute, does that make you brave? No, I think that makes you stupid. I will never play without the mask again.

Risks I think are the thing that make life important and everything that you and I do is risk vs. benefit. Is there a risk to sending your kid out? Absolutely. Is there a benefit? It exceeds the risk.

We are like a rider on top of a gigantic elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll often go where he wants. How can one control the elephant? In part, this comes with maturity. In part, this comes with the development of your frontal cortex, so the frontal areas of the brain are especially involved in self-control, in suppressing your initial instinct to act. This is why teenagers are so impulsive. So it's terrible to allow the death penalty for teenagers, because they really don't have working brains yet.

I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.

By definition, risk-takers often fail. So do morons. In practice it's difficult to sort them out.

Jump or stay in the boat.

-I am not sure whether he's sane. -If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

The best results I have had in my life; the most enjoyable times, have all come from asking the simple question: 'What is the worst that could happen?'

The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans, paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.

The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice. You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come. Where will you be a few years down the line. Will it be everything you dreamed of. We seal our fate with the choices we take, but don't give a second thought to the chances we take.

Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him.