Top 70 Aspen Matis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning’s somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me.”

— Aspen Matis

2. “Seamless like a fall leaf changing color, my will switched powerfully.”

— Aspen Matis

3. “Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity – a sacred thing.”

— Aspen Matis

4. “Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope.”

— Aspen Matis

5. “Bright yellow lemons twinkled in the twilight sun on a terrace tree, and far beyond my window, San Francisco lay, flat like a pastel toy.”

— Aspen Matis

6. “Smiling at an echo of his voice on my mind’s stage, I felt the void of all I hadn’t said.”

— Aspen Matis

7. “Every person exists in their own shallow bowl, and they can’t see over the rim,” he explained. “But they think that their world is the world – the truth. When in reality, no two bowls are identical, and all people are stuck trapped in their own.”

— Aspen Matis

8. “Thus we joined spirit with Joan Didion and Patti Smith and about a million other dreamers who, against all odds, had landed here, moving on fumes of reveries, to New York City.”

— Aspen Matis

9. “That evening after dinner, I picked lemons from the tree in the backyard, the fruits golden bulbs under the rising moon.”

— Aspen Matis

10. “And if I’d be left alone in the woods again, I smiled to think how I’d find new gifts and thrive. At the end of a long trail and the beginning of the rest of my life, I was committed to always loving myself. I would put myself in that win-win situation.”

— Aspen Matis

11. “The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard.”

— Aspen Matis

12. “Day vivified the city, and we found a rogue path through the dunes down to the beach, the foam edge of teal sea. The whole sky celestial sapphire.”

— Aspen Matis

13. “The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry.”

— Aspen Matis

14. “Nights alone in my yellow kitchen, I made myself hot chocolate. I missed my mother. In my window, maple leaves rusted, young fall blooming.”

— Aspen Matis

15. “The only comfort I found was in planning to disappear.”

— Aspen Matis

16. “We spent June and July in the Rockies, growing stronger, feeling feral in the untamed range of mountains.”

— Aspen Matis

17. “Newly married, Justin and I evacuated the woods where we had once lived as nomads. We would no longer pass sweet breezy days in our sleek tent, in mossy hills and sun, showering in waterfalls. That era was now our memory, a shared dream.”

— Aspen Matis

18. “Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.”

— Aspen Matis

19. “Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.”

— Aspen Matis

20. “Walking back home that afternoon, I felt more aware of the poverty and opulence on every sidewalk – we brushed past a raven-haired lady with a thousand-dollar handbag and a skinny child with toeless shoes begging for change.”

— Aspen Matis

21. “I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me.”

— Aspen Matis

22. “In the small hours of a cold February dawn, Justin and I walked to the Pacific, high cliffs eroding over the ocean, crashed and crashed by lapping salty waves. Their spray misted us in day’s young purple air, exhilarating. Walking the Golden Gate Bridge, our world receding, pale gold sunrise lit thin fog, morning coloring us like a faded fairy tale.”

— Aspen Matis

23. “Childhood is a wilderness.”

— Aspen Matis

24. “Under gold clouds, he pushed the limits of my body, setting a faster pace – some days surpassing forty rugged miles, unstopping through morning’s thick peach haze; noon’s warmth; red evening sun.”

— Aspen Matis

25. “The first time I walked alone, thirteen, I was terrified. A twig snapped under my shoe; my heart revved wildly. I’d walked these sidewalks a thousand times with my mom, yet I was scared by all her fears. Don’t talk to strangers, walk quickly past parked cars, look both ways, all ways, always. Be alert. There was so damn much to remember to stay safe.”

— Aspen Matis

26. “In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.”

— Aspen Matis

27. “Beneath hot sun, desert roses bloomed. Under cold moon, I still refused to.”

— Aspen Matis

28. “College had always felt more like an anchor than a kite, a tedious and time-eating entrapment. Studying for pointless tests stole away nights, rote memorization disappearing the freedom of creation.”

— Aspen Matis

29. “I flushed – this time not in shame – but in rage.”

— Aspen Matis

30. “Vividly seeing that love had always been my mother’s guide, I could finally release my anger – let go of it there in the woods – and move past it.”

— Aspen Matis

31. “Because in the wake of devastation, growth becomes the only survival option. In.”

— Aspen Matis

32. “Swallowed up in the belly of the whale of infatuation, I now needed to distract myself in order to stay happy. Because our unknowable future shadowed the countenance of my soul.”

— Aspen Matis

33. “The structure crouched like a great stone tiger on a slope of the East Bay, resting on the cliffside with calm grace.”

— Aspen Matis

34. “When we apply the lessons we’ve struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment – which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them.”

— Aspen Matis

35. “I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself.”

— Aspen Matis

36. “In lovesickness we had found a common language.”

— Aspen Matis

37. “But in creative fields, a degree is a prerequisite for nothing.”

— Aspen Matis

38. “And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren’t, and so anything – great and terrible – felt possible to me now.”

— Aspen Matis

39. “My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.”

— Aspen Matis

40. “Though I was starved for contact, I didn’t stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other.”

— Aspen Matis

41. “My parents had lived in California, long ago, when they were twenty and twenty-two, also newly married. This distant knowledge romanced me like a whiff of honey, the sweet and mythic prehistory of my existence.”

— Aspen Matis

42. “I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.”

— Aspen Matis

43. “Held in his piercing powder-blue vision, I froze. A butterfly awakened in my chest.”

— Aspen Matis

44. “And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way.”

— Aspen Matis

45. “A single black ant sped across the floor beyond our naked toes, and I wondered why I felt so oppositional. His expression of unflappable faith had touched a profound place, the deep wellspring of my purpose – my future dream I cradled like a soft and formative pearl.”

— Aspen Matis

46. “I walked, floated, lighter – forty miles, my biggest day yet. I’d lifted the burden of guilt and shame off my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self – forgiveness for my innocence.”

— Aspen Matis

47. “I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.”

— Aspen Matis

48. “Spirit dancing, I envisioned a place inside this energetic city, ours: a classic townhouse on a steep street with expansive views of the Pacific, the magenta siding sun-faded – a third-story perch, thick platinum haze embracing our new home.”

— Aspen Matis

49. “It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.”

— Aspen Matis

50. “When tomorrow broke, our hillside home filled up with honeyed light, a fish tank.”

— Aspen Matis