Amanda

“Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“[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.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do       With your one wild and precious life? MARY OLIVER, “The Summer Day”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail