Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.” ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

"[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear." ― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail