“The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you. ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you excperienced my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I build in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. ... It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: ... Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and scared. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be.”
Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“All this is probably for nothing,' she [her mother] said once we'd hatched the plan. 'Most likely I'll flunk out anyway.' To prepare, she shadowed me during the last months of my senior year of high school, doing all the homework that I was assigned, honing her skills. She replicated my worksheets, wrote the same papers I had to write, read every one of the books. I graded her work, using my teacher's marks as a guide. I judged her a shaky student at best.
She went to college and earned straight As”
Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“It was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls enchanting the city”
Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do -- have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“There is always a sunrise and always a sunset. It’s up to you to be there for it, my mom said a million years ago, when she was alive. I rolled my eyes then, a million years ago. Now I live my life by it.”
Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“If you'd like to gain a new understanding of assets and liabilities, get into gardening.”
“When your partner says 'I love you' 24 times per day but never does anything for you, 'show, don’t tell' becomes a very easy concept to grasp.”