It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach. - Cheryl Strayed

All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was. And she’d told me, with reluctance or relish, laughing and asking why on earth I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I couldn’t explain. But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

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.

Write so blazingly good that you can't be framed... Write like a motherfucker.