I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
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.
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.
How wild it was, to let it be.
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.
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.
Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.
The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write – really that’s exactly what you need to write.
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.
Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.
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.
The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.
Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn’t think I could do that.
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.
People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there’s no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...
Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.
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.