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

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

Dogs change lives. Half Buddha, half Bozo, they keep us tethered to the earth, and teach us to fly. Our dogs are our sanity keepers.

When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.

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.

Movement helps keep me centered. I am a disaster, for instance, at sitting meditation, but I'm pretty decent at walking meditation.

Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.

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

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.

One thing I'm always thinking about myself is what am I willing to make up? And the answer is not much.

It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.

Hufflepuffs are particularly good finders!

When I am reading a book whether wise or silly it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

From my perspective, there's no reason to be afraid of aging, because if you age, you're lucky! The alternative is death.

At the end of day, people are starving and, if people are starving and thirsty and they need to keep their families alive, people become desperate quickly. There are real world examples of this.

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.

Just because I am wheelchair-bound doesn't mean I don't get around.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

We're not trying to be something we aren't; rather, we're reconnecting with who we are.

The New Deal is inconsistent with the principles of limited government and with the constitutional provisions designed to secure that end.

The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral earth community with all its human and other-than-human components.