I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.

I really came to literature through poetry.

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.