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'The path they cut was three or four times wider than the tracks themselves, and over the years it filled itself with wildflowers and grasses - fireweed and milkweed, goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace, harebell and goat's beard - so I walked along the rails each morning as if walking through a meadow. By September everything was in seed. The seed heads shook their contents over you as you passed and the burrs clung to your clothes. Some days thousands of milkweed pods burst open together, triggered by the heat of he sun; thousands and thousands of small silent explosions repeating themselves in salvos down the miles of tracks. On those days I walked through clouds of silken down drifting about like smoke in the morning breeze.

I passed through all this as if I was sleepwalking. I was conscious of it but I did not really see it. At school it was the same; Miss Carrington would lecture us on arithmetic or grammar or history or geography, and I would sit, politely attentive, and not take in a single word. I would be watching the dust motes, perhaps, as they hung in the broad bands of sunlight that slanted through the classroom windows"

"You don't know, my Charley, that right down there, in the little valley, I fished for trout with your namesake, my Uncle Charley. And over there - see where I'm pointing - my mother shot a wildcat. Straight down there, forty miles away, our family rank was - old starvation ranch. Can you see that darker place down there. Well that's a tiny canyon with a clear lovely stream bordered with wild azaleas and fringed with big oaks. And on one of those oaks my father burned his name with a hot iron together with the name of the girl he loved. In the long years the bark grew over the burn and covered it..... In spring , Charley, when the valley is carpeted with blue lupines like a flowery sea, there's the smell of heaven up here, the smell of heaven."

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

"After you have one pitch figured out, you work on another. Eventually you put together a complete series of pitches to make a collective, massive whole"

"The discovery of a mole-sized nubbin of rock and a barely visible hairline fracture had filled me with so much energy that I knew  that I had seen a path forward for the next year. If the secret to happiness was the ability to find joy in small things that have been in front of you the entire time, then the Dawn Wall was truly the Zen-master teacher"

"Alex simply doesn't waste any energy worrying about things he can't control. Some might call this delusion, or false optimism. Some might go so far to call it reckless. Alex is the only person who I have climbed with who just calls it reality. We analysed the situations as we encountered them. Start at the beginning; see what happens. And, while we are at it we might as well have some fun"

'Every time you breathe, you exhale 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen - so many that with a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And everyone who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe a bit of you.'

Bill Bryson - The Body A Guide for Occupants

Quote from Jeanette Winterson "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal"

'That there might be a level that we can reach above the ordinary conflict is a seductive one. Yung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises - at that level there is only a winner and loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above, like seeing a storm from higher ground...... how absurd it all is - the things that mean so much, the feuds we carry, the irreconcilables'