Top 100 Cheryl Strayed Quotes
#2. He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.
Cheryl Strayed
#4. It turns out you have to be an apprentice in this world.
Cheryl Strayed
#5. I think I cry because it always strikes me as sacred, all those people going by. People who decided simply to live their truth, even when doing so wasn't simple. Each and every one of them had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you'll crucify me.
Just like Jesus did.
Cheryl Strayed
#6. 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
#7. I know its a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it's also fucking fantastic. You are, after all, the only person you can change.
Cheryl Strayed
#8. So on one hand, because the wilderness was familiar to me, it really helped me be brave. But it still was scary sometimes. I had to say to myself: "Chances are, you're not going to be mauled by a bear."
Cheryl Strayed
#9. Don't worry. Don't apologize. Don't cower behind the defeated security of there is no 'room for someone like me'. There isn't room for any one of us. It's up to you to make a place for yourself in the world. So get to work.
Cheryl Strayed
#11. That your friends have those opinions, however, does not mean that they don't love you or value you as a friend or otherwise think you are one of the best people they know.
Cheryl Strayed
#12. Cultivate an understanding that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.
Cheryl Strayed
#13. I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.
Cheryl Strayed
#14. It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
Cheryl Strayed
#15. I'd first heard of it only seven months before, when I was living in Minneapolis,
Cheryl Strayed
#16. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
Cheryl Strayed
#17. Saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.
Cheryl Strayed
#18. The void? I'd asked," crestfallen.
"It's a good thing," she said. "It's the place where things are born, where they begin, Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive.
Cheryl Strayed
#19. There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.
Cheryl Strayed
#20. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath. I
Cheryl Strayed
#21. I know it's hard to write, darling. But it's harder not to. The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.
Cheryl Strayed
#22. Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.
Cheryl Strayed
#23. A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn't let it define your life.
Cheryl Strayed
#24. This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was.
Cheryl Strayed
#25. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.
Cheryl Strayed
#26. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.
Cheryl Strayed
#27. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
Cheryl Strayed
#28. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and waterr and to be able to pt my backpack down
Cheryl Strayed
#29. So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.
Cheryl Strayed
#30. That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.
Cheryl Strayed
#31. But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.
Cheryl Strayed
#32. I didn't know where I was going until I got there. It
Cheryl Strayed
#33. Thinking deeply about your choices and actions from the stance of your future self can serve as both a motivational and a corrective force.
Cheryl Strayed
#34. Had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be - strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.
Cheryl Strayed
#35. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce.
Cheryl Strayed
#36. The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.
Cheryl Strayed
#37. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
Cheryl Strayed
#38. I'd loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When
Cheryl Strayed
#39. The people in my life were like the BandAids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.
Cheryl Strayed
#41. And the fuck is yours too, WTF. That question does not apply 'to everything every day.' If it does, you're wasting your life. If it does, you're a lazy coward and you are not a lazy coward.
Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.
Cheryl Strayed
#43. I think we underestimate the universe's desire to be kind to us.
Cheryl Strayed
#44. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.
Cheryl Strayed
#45. I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.
Cheryl Strayed
#46. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?
Cheryl Strayed
#47. 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
#48. Your light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.
Cheryl Strayed
#49. I'd set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again.
Cheryl Strayed
#50. Wounded?" was all I could manage. "Yes," said Pat. "And you're wounded in the same place. That's what fathers do if they don't heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.
Cheryl Strayed
#51. Be the captain. You are the captain. Take the ball and run.
Cheryl Strayed
#52. The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky.
Cheryl Strayed
#53. The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can't write - really that's exactly what you need to write.
Cheryl Strayed
#54. At a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us.
Cheryl Strayed
#55. Who would I be if I didn't? Who would I be if I did?
Cheryl Strayed
#56. What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What
Cheryl Strayed
#57. My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked.
Cheryl Strayed
#58. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right. I
Cheryl Strayed
#59. I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
Cheryl Strayed
#60. It's folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?
Cheryl Strayed
#61. My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up - and I'm that person for sure.
Cheryl Strayed
#62. When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.
Cheryl Strayed
#64. Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.
Cheryl Strayed
#65. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives.
Cheryl Strayed
#67. I looked north, in its direction - the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.
Cheryl Strayed
#68. We didn't exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.
Cheryl Strayed
#69. But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really - all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me.
Cheryl Strayed
#70. When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.
Cheryl Strayed
#71. There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding.
Cheryl Strayed
#72. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding
Cheryl Strayed
#73. There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time fore once / with all my intelligence.
Cheryl Strayed
#74. I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living.
Cheryl Strayed
#75. 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
#76. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an orphan forevermore, and I could take no mercy on it.
Cheryl Strayed
#77. I didn't know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.
Cheryl Strayed
#78. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again.
Cheryl Strayed
#79. There is no cure except to live the hell out of our lives, to take it apart, to put it back together, to dig it all up, and then fill the hole. To help ourselves and one another to the best of our abilities. To believe everything entirely, while also calling bullshit for what it is.
Cheryl Strayed
#80. quitting. But now, only ten days out, I was done. I wanted
Cheryl Strayed
#81. Just as I'd seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn't have a face.
Cheryl Strayed
#82. Hard as I fought for it to be otherwise, finally I had to admit it too: without my mother, we weren't what we'd been; we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope.
Cheryl Strayed
#83. You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.
Cheryl Strayed
#84. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.
Cheryl Strayed
#85. Not because I couldn't find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother's life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch.
Cheryl Strayed
#86. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.
Cheryl Strayed
#87. He had no words for it, what made him, what pained him, what rocked him and fucked him.
Cheryl Strayed
#88. me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on. It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a physical achievement far beyond anything I'd ever done. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was,
Cheryl Strayed
#89. And if there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out.
Cheryl Strayed
#90. That place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. It's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.
Cheryl Strayed
#91. This is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You've earned the right to grow.
Cheryl Strayed
#92. It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.
Cheryl Strayed
#94. But thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.
Cheryl Strayed
#95. I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
Cheryl Strayed
#96. Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.
Cheryl Strayed
#97. It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn't even know I wanted until I didn't get it.
Cheryl Strayed
#99. We often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.
Cheryl Strayed
#100. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It's strength. It's nerve.
Cheryl Strayed
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