Alexa Muri

“Losing Paul to time was far from the worst thing to happen to me, but the feeling doesn't always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn - they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Perhaps someone would say I had no choice but to trust her and perhaps this is true, but also, and I understand this now, I love her and I loved her in that rare way, that non-possessive and accepting way that it seems people are always trying and failing to love someone...”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who'd kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail