I’d loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they’d taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when … - Cheryl Strayed

[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself. Every last one of us can do better than give up.

The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you've got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.

Every now and then I could see myself — truly see myself — and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.