I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.

The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work.

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

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.