To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Oh happy pessimists! What a joy it is to them to be able to prove again and again that there is no joy.

Coffee’s the elixir of life.

All uncertainly is fruitful... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.

God sometimes does His work with gentle drizzle, not storms.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state.

Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.

Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.