Top 100 Cheryl Strayed Quotes
#1. Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.
Mira Bartok
#2. I'm encouraging these women, like Cheryl Strayed, to take the jump to writing for the screen. She is adapting her book Tiny Beautiful Things for us. They're infinitely capable of tackling the format.
Reese Witherspoon
#3. I always let my husband read the script so he knows what's about to happen to his wife. When I played Cheryl Strayed in Wild, I'd get really mad about certain things, I'd say really profound things, and I'd curse out of nowhere. He'd say, "Are you you, or are you Cheryl?"
Reese Witherspoon
#4. No one can write like Cheryl Strayed.
Ann Hood
#5. Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.
Pam Houston
#6. They do the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before. (from the Introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed)
Steve Almond
#7. In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.
Ursula Hegi
#8. The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.
Cheryl Strayed
#9. What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.
Cheryl Strayed
#10. We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we made up to oppress other people.
Cheryl Strayed
#11. The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
Cheryl Strayed
#12. 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
#14. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.
Cheryl Strayed
#15. With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.
Cheryl Strayed
#16. No one can touch that love or alter it or take it away from you. Your love for your son belongs only to you. It will live in you until the day you die.
Cheryl Strayed
#17. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
Cheryl Strayed
#18. A caldera, it's called - a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that's had its very heart removed.
Cheryl Strayed
#19. He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.
Cheryl Strayed
#21. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine.
Cheryl Strayed
#22. It turns out you have to be an apprentice in this world.
Cheryl Strayed
#25. When it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair. If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we've fallen before. I hope you will remember that the next time you fail ... Remembering that is the most important work as parents we can possibly do.
Cheryl Strayed
#26. 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
#27. People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
Cheryl Strayed
#28. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.
Cheryl Strayed
#29. The good things aren't a movie. There isn't enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There
Cheryl Strayed
#30. 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
#31. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
Cheryl Strayed
#32. 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
#33. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.
Cheryl Strayed
#34. Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I'm always interacting with people or with my computer or phone.
Cheryl Strayed
#35. 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
#36. Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun.
Cheryl Strayed
#38. The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.
Cheryl Strayed
#39. I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me.
Cheryl Strayed
#40. When I have something to say that's particularly hard to say, I often write it down first.
Cheryl Strayed
#41. 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
#42. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
Cheryl Strayed
#43. If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.
Cheryl Strayed
#46. 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
#47. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.
Cheryl Strayed
#48. 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
#49. I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.
Cheryl Strayed
#50. Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it to yourself.
Cheryl Strayed
#51. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do what 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.
Cheryl Strayed
#52. Because when an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she's actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own humanity.
Cheryl Strayed
#53. my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away.
Cheryl Strayed
#54. I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.
Cheryl Strayed
#55. It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
Cheryl Strayed
#56. I'd first heard of it only seven months before, when I was living in Minneapolis,
Cheryl Strayed
#57. He didn't do anything. I'm the one. I broke my own heart.
Cheryl Strayed
#58. It felt ancient. Knowing. Utterly and profoundly indifferent to me.
Cheryl Strayed
#59. I'd entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan.
Cheryl Strayed
#61. I grew up and left home for college in the Twin Cities at a school called St. Thomas,
Cheryl Strayed
#62. 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
#63. [Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.
Cheryl Strayed
#64. Only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.
Cheryl Strayed
#65. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You
Cheryl Strayed
#66. Hello, fear. Thank you for being here. You're my indication that I'm doing what I need to do.
Cheryl Strayed
#67. So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless.
Cheryl Strayed
#68. 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
#70. I'm a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
Cheryl Strayed
#71. 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
#72. I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that.
Cheryl Strayed
#74. One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me.
Cheryl Strayed
#75. The same as she'd always done when she'd seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were.
Cheryl Strayed
#76. If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we've fallen before. I hope you will remember that the next time you fail. I hope I will too.
Cheryl Strayed
#77. 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
#78. To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.
Cheryl Strayed
#79. She loved horses and Hank Williams and had a best friend named Babs.
Cheryl Strayed
#80. I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.
Cheryl Strayed
#81. You listed the three options you believe you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you're fucked before you begin.
Cheryl Strayed
#82. 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
#83. I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
Cheryl Strayed
#85. The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center.
Cheryl Strayed
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Bravery is acknowledging your fear and doing it anyway.
Cheryl Strayed
#89. The body knows. When your heart sinks. When you feel sick to your gut. When something blossoms in your chest. When your brain gloriously pops. That's your body telling you the One True Thing. Listen to it.
Cheryl Strayed
#91. You're asking," I said. "I've always been the one to end
Cheryl Strayed
#92. A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn't let it define your life.
Cheryl Strayed
#93. It's wrong that this is required of you. It's wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.
Cheryl Strayed
#95. Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.
Cheryl Strayed
#96. My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.
Cheryl Strayed
#97. Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way as lack of it does.
Cheryl Strayed
#98. But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?
Cheryl Strayed
#99. This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was.
Cheryl Strayed
#100. Was there in '63, when I was barely eighteen. But now
Cheryl Strayed
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