You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it

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.

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 it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

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

I really came to literature through poetry.