Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail Quotes

“I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.”

“I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.”

“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

“I only knew that it was time to go, so I opened the door and stepped into the light.”

“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.”

“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of it’s complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”

“I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

“[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.”

“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”

“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.”

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed.”

“I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”

“I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.”

“There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.”

“I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.”

“Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.”

“It felt pretty awful, and yet perhaps this was how it felt to be a backpacker.”

“There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.”

“That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.”