Cheryl Strayed Quotes

I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
Cheryl Strayed
The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.
Cheryl Strayed
It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.
Cheryl Strayed
One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It’s like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.
Cheryl Strayed
God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.
Cheryl Strayed
But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn't have to be amazed by him anymore.There were so many other amazing things in this world.They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment i was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.
Cheryl Strayed
As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true.
Cheryl Strayed
He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again.
Cheryl Strayed
The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.
Cheryl Strayed
When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.
Cheryl Strayed
It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there
Cheryl Strayed
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.
Cheryl Strayed
Write like a motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed
The sky didn't wonder where it was.
Cheryl Strayed
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
.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.
Cheryl Strayed
It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.
Cheryl Strayed
In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
Cheryl Strayed
He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
Cheryl Strayed
I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those fountains of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We’re hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we’re falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won’t stick.
Cheryl Strayed
It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.
Cheryl Strayed
I have breathed my way through so many people I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn't change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes I've breathed in gratitude and out forgiveness. Sometimes I haven't been able to muster anything beyond the breath itself, my mind forced blank with nothing but the desire to be free of sorrow and rage.
Cheryl Strayed
I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.
Cheryl Strayed
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
Cheryl Strayed
Then you'd sob and sob and sob so hard you couldn't stand up until finally you'd go quiet and your head would weigh seven hundred pounds and you'd lift it from your hands and rise to walk into the bathroom to look at yourself solemnly in the mirror and you'd know for sure that you were dead. Living but dead. And all because this person didn't love you anymore, or even if he/she loved you he/she didn't want you and what kind of life was that? it was no life. There would be no life anymore. There would be only one unbearable minute after another and during each of those minutes this person you wanted would not want you and so you would begin to cry again and you'd watch yourself cry pathetically in the mirror until you couldn't cry anymore, so you'd stop.
Cheryl Strayed
I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.
Cheryl Strayed
Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
Cheryl Strayed