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

Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get the same thing... Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same: I want love and I'm afraid I'll never get it. It's hard to answer those letters because I'm an advice columnist, not a fortune-teller. I have words instead of a crystal ball. I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it.

Going down (descending), I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yard on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn't realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.

You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don't, it's a living death. You're just standing in one place dying.