If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate.

The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

While you can't keep your heart from getting broken, you can stop breaking your own heart...once you realize the difference between what you can control and what you can't, and that it's far, far more fun to lavish all that attention on your own self-worth.