Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?

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.

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.

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.