Cheryl Strayed Quotes

There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn't help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical sufferings some of my emotional suffering would fade away. (93)

~ Cheryl Strayed

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69)

~ Cheryl Strayed

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

~ Cheryl Strayed

It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.

~ Cheryl Strayed

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

~ Cheryl Strayed

... In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it. You're generally less humble in that decade than you'll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery.

~ Cheryl Strayed

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. 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.You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

~ Cheryl Strayed

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: 'Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire;' or maybe just: 'Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.'And then smile very serenely until they say, 'Oh.

~ Cheryl Strayed

...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

What if you allowed your God to exist in he simple words of compassion others offer you? ... What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through our window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering more than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

~ Cheryl Strayed

I suggest you forget about forgiveness for now and strive for acceptance instead. Accept that the man you love was unfaithful to you. Accept that the woman you once held in regard treated you with disrespect. Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn't want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are a part of even a joyful life. Accept that it's going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

~ Cheryl Strayed

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justif 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.You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you've got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: ... Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

~ Cheryl Strayed

Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever 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

Go, even though you love him.Go, even though he is kind and faithful and dear to you.Go, even though he's your best friend and you're his. Go, even though you can't imagine your life without him. Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him. Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three. Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though you're afraid of being alone. Go, even though you're sure no one will ever love you as well as he does. Go, even though there is nowhere to go.Go, even though you don't know exactly why you can't stay.Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough.

~ Cheryl Strayed

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them?THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.

~ Cheryl Strayed

The 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.

~ Cheryl Strayed

This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing process.

~ Cheryl Strayed

It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.

~ Cheryl Strayed

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...I didn't feel like a big fate 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

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

~ 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

.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

~ 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

The sky didn't wonder where it was.

~ Cheryl Strayed

Write like a motherfucker.

~ 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

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

When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.

~ Cheryl Strayed