“The flip side of freedom is this: When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.”

“Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.”

“Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.”

“It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.”

“One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.”

“Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.”

“It seem absurd to me that they don't know, haven't felt any change or tremor, even as my life has been completely turned upside down.”