Stillness is a harder concept for me than ecstasy, but I can imagine it best when I am fully present and paying strict attention to a place I am moving through.

Being in the presence of the "other" seems to show me who I am in a way that is really important to me. I feel radically more comfortable in Laos, say, than I do in Pennsylvania.

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.

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

There are three principles to remember if you are to teach a human being anything, and they are consistency, consistency, consistency.They are such fragile creatures to begin with, with poor eyes, poorer hearing, and no sense of smell left to speak of, it's no wonder they are made of fear. Some centuries ago they moved inside and with that move went nine-tenths of their intuition. It is almost unmerciful to make them live so long when they spend their lives in so much pain.

I'm always out looking for weird, beautiful things.

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.