Cheryl Strayed

"It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. The image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple weeks after we left the , and then, once she was admitted to the wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more modest and true."

"... a secret inside myself was that I had to be a writer. Ever since I learned how to read when I was six or seven, I just knew: this was my thing — this was my calling. This is what I was going to do in the world."

"... For three months she hiked 1,100 miles alone along the , a continuous wilderness undulating from Mexico to Canada over nine mountain ranges – the to the . ... On her epic trek, this novice hiker faced temperatures of 100 degrees in the shade on the and record snowfalls in the high sierras, not to mention bears, rattlesnakes and failed waterholes. ..."