“Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.”

“When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.”

“On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy's "Family Happiness", having marked several passages that moved him:"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?" ...”

“Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”

“I now walk into the wild.”

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”