Korey Craddock

“Do you like the race so far?’

I looked at her, trying to find sarcasm, but she was serious; she really wanted to know. And I thought of how to answer her.

I had gotten lost, been run over by a moose, watched a dog get killed, seen a man cry, dragged over a third of the teams off on the wrong trail, and been absolutely hammered by beauty while all this was happening. (It was, I would find later, essentially a normal Iditarod day — perhaps a bit calmer than most.) I opened my mouth.

‘I …’

Nothing came. She patted my arm and nodded. ‘I understand. It’s so early in the race. There’ll be more later to talk about …’

And she left me before I could tell her that I thought my whole life had changed, that my basic understanding of values had changed, that I wasn’t sure if I would ever recover, that I had seen god and he was a dog-man and that nothing, ever, would be the same for me again, and it was only the first true checkpoint of the race.

I had come just one hundred miles.”
― Gary Paulsen, Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod

“I feel all the same things when I do things alone as when Ole Golly was here. The bath feels hot, the bed feels soft, but I feel there's a funny little hole in me that wasn't there before, like a splinter in your finger, but this is somewhere above my stomach.”
― Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

“I don't give a damn about where I happen to be, provided nothing stops me from going into my mind.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“The warm, resonant tones drifted through the wreckage, full-bodied and alive, a memory in every octave.”
― Marcia Breece, The Last Bottle