Cheryl Strayed Quotes

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.

...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

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

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

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.

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

My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.

My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.

The only way out of a hole is to climb out.

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!

Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.

I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.

We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap.

I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.

I was trying to find a new home in the world.

I remember being absolutely rocked to my core by how profoundly I could love another human being.

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.

He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

I've learned so much as both a writer and a human.

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.

A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost

Acceptance is a small quiet room.

Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it

The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.

Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.

…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

Wanting to leave is enough.

I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.

There is a path toward the 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.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.

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.

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.

Jump high and hard with intention and heart.

One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it's tedious and monotonous. You're bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head.

All of us, as we mature and grow up - if we're doing life right - we evolve.

You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don't, it's a living death. You're just standing in one place dying.

I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, "Tenth of December." He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.

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.