Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.
Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.
The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.
You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don't, it's a living death. You're just standing in one place dying.
I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.
Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it
I am an advocate of honesty and openness, and I think deceit is a dangerous seed to plant and let grow in relationships.
Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.
I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.
Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.
Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.
Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.
...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn't realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.
My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.
Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.
My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.
I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living.
Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.
But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?
Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.
Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost
One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it's tedious and monotonous. You're bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head.
Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.
It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.
…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.
What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, "Tenth of December." He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.
You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.
If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.
I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap.
With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.