Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

It’s a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That...

In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

There are so many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a...

.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me–just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better...

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.

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also...

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how...

(I)t was Lady who saved my mother’s life. Lady, who made it possible for her not only to walk away from my father, but also to keep going. Horses were my mother’s religion. It was...

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer — and yet also, like many things, so very simple — was how few choices I had...

It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that...

I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith,or if there was such...

Go, even though you love him.Go, even though he is kind and faithful and dear to you.Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his. Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without...

A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone.

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power.

It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away...

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my...

As close as we’d been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings...

She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she’d made her confession, though she didn’t regret having confessed. Perhaps that was...

…but thinking about it didn’t do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn’t have a bottom.

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship...

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to...

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn’t just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink. I...

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.

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don’t have...

What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life....

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 reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes...

My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

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.

It was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls enchanting the city

You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

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.

Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

Very nice,” said Rick after a while. “Very nice,” he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. “What is?” I asked, turning to him, though I knew. “Everything,” he said. And it was true.

But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.

The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to...

Grief doesn’t have a face.

I’d never had a mind for math. … It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a...

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.

It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes...

It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.