our greatest fears are relational. It’s all that stuff about forgiveness and risking rejection and learning to love.

Carlos said if we would have stayed on the trail along the river, Machu Picchu was only six hours away. In ancient times, the river was used as a commercial route, Carlos said, but if you visited Machu Picchu on a pilgrimage, you had to take the Inca Trail. When he said this, he pointed toward the Andes, up toward the snow, above the thick trees

I kept resisting my story. But you can only do that for so long. It’s true what Steven Pressfield says: there is a force resisting the beautiful things in the world, and too many of us are giving in. The world needs for us to have courage, Robert McKee says at the end of his book. The world needs for us to write something better.

I don’t think it’s any different when it comes to real-life stories. It would be easier not to try, not to get out of bed.

William Zinsser says that writers “love to have written,”

I asked Marcos what he’d discovered; and he said, essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural

the human body displayed physical evidence that we are not the same person we were when we were kids, or even a season before. He said we think we are the same person, but we aren’t. “People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren’t.” For instance, Marcos said, “The human body essentially recreates itself every six months.

I’ve never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking all movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their lives are meaningless. I wonder if they’ve chosen to believe their whole existence is unremarkable, and are projecting

The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want.