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.

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

You get to define the terms of 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.

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother — even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.