“I first got very thin after Ashley. I felt like my stomach was doing backflips - like my emotions had taken over and made me full.”

“It's the broken plans you have made that are the hardest to get over.”

“I've learned so much from my mistakes... I'm thinking of making some more.”

“Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. 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.”

“It's rare for me to be asked out and for me to respond in a positive way is rarer still. I'm the worst - a man has to be just right for me.”

“Too much of anything can make you sick,even the good can be a curse - Cheryl Cole”

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.How wild it was, to let it be.”