I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake.

I'm not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth.

Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.

People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me.

I've always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings.

Give me a labyrinth to walk and I can usually free my mind.

There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life.