Cheryl Strayed Quotes

But the thing was, I didn't want it. Maybe I never really had. I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close. ~ Cheryl Strayed

My pack rose up like a mantle behind me, towering several inches above my head, and gripped me like a vice all the way down to my tailbone. It felt pretty awful, and yet perhaps this was how it felt to be a backpacker.
I didn't know.
I only knew that it was time to go, so I opened the door and stepped into the light. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle. ~ 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

Hen 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

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

This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

You're asking," I said. "I've always been the one to end ~ Cheryl Strayed

The father's job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it's necessary to do so. If you don't get that from your father, you have to teach yourself. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Will you do it later or will you do it now? ~ Cheryl Strayed

It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn't have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Sometimes the thing you fear the most in your relationship turns out to be the thing that brings you and your partner to a deeper place of understanding and intimacy. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

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

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here. ~ Cheryl Strayed

When the path reveals itself, follow it. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Read it like a motherfucker. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The PCT had taught me what a mile was. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated. ~ Cheryl Strayed

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself. ~ Cheryl Strayed

To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Write like a motherfucker. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Because no matter how experimental he is, his life isn't an experiment. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

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

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

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

I'd first heard of it only seven months before, when I was living in Minneapolis, ~ Cheryl Strayed

wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She ~ Cheryl Strayed

I actually don't have any fear of people reading Wild and going out unprepared. Because one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I went out unprepared. And when you really think about it, all I did wrong was that I took too much stuff, which is the most common backpacker mistake. The part that I wasn't prepared for is the part you can't prepare for. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible! ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

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

We yogied this from day hikers for you. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I ~ Cheryl Strayed

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I'd finally come to understand what *it* had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Grief is tremendous, but love is bigger. You are grieving because you loved truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of death. Allowing this into your consciousness will not keep you from suffering, but it will help you survive the next day. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Romantic love is not a competitive sport. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night 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. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Run toward the darkness, sweet peas, and shine. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Withholding distorts reality. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Addiction is a tunnel that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Everything else happens out here in the light. ~ Cheryl Strayed

People die because they want who they want. They do all kinds of crazy, stupid, sweet, tender, amazing, self-destructive things. You aren't going to make anyone "see the light and realize that what they're doing is wrong." You just aren't. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

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

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

She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

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

I'd made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I'd been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn't prepare me for what would happen next. ~ Cheryl Strayed

But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn't think I could do that. ~ Cheryl Strayed

On the afternoon of the fifth day, as I made my way along a narrow and steep stretch of trail, I looked up to see an enormous brown horned animal charging at me. "Moose!" I hollered, though I knew that it wasn't a moose. In the panic of the moment, my mind couldn't wrap around what I was seeing and a moose was the closest thing to it. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Where was my mother? I wondered. I'd carried her so long, staggering beneath her weight. On the other side of the river, I let myself think. And something inside of me released. ~ Cheryl Strayed

There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you. ~ Cheryl Strayed

A caldera, it's called - a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that's had its very heart removed. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Do you believe in reincarnation?" I asked as we looked together at the intricate drawings, reading bits about them in the paragraph of text on each page. "I don't," he said. "I believe we're here once and what we do matters. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

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

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Transformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It's one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

I was a terrible believer in things, I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was just as searching as I was skeptical. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Rise to the occasion of your one and only heart. ~ Cheryl Strayed

So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. ~ Cheryl Strayed

After my parents divorced, I realized that my father's absence from my life was, sadly, a good thing. There weren't any more violent scenes," I said. "I mean, imagine my life if I'd been raised by my father." "Imagine your life if you'd had a father who loved you as a father should," Vince countered. I tried to imagine such a thing, but my mind could not be forced to do it. I couldn't break it down into a list. I couldn't land on love or security, confidence or a sense of belonging. A father who loved you as a father should was greater than his parts. He was like the whirl of white on the YOU ARE HERE poster behind Vince's head. He was one giant inexplicable thing that contained a million other things, and because I'd never had one, I feared I'd never find myself inside that great white swirl. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I think it's neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me
just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we'd be better off. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Be brave. Write what's true for you. Write what you think. What about what confuses you and compels you. Write about the crazy, hard, and beautiful. Write what scares you. Write what makes you laugh and write what makes you weep. What what makes you feel ashamed or proud. Writing is risk and revelation. There's no need to show up at the party if you're only going to stand around with your hands in your pockets and stare at the drapes. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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 suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I'd begun my hike, I hadn't shed a single tear. ~ 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

I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things. ~ Cheryl Strayed

... 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. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Every last one of us can do better than give up. ~ Cheryl Strayed

It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we're brave enough to touch the rawesr, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without paues and see - thrillingly, terrifyingly - that it was never her we had to fear.
It war always only us. ~ 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

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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. ~ Cheryl Strayed

She had to reach. She had to want it more than she'd ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

You asked me when is the right time to tell your lover that you love her and the answer is when you think you love her. That's also the right time to tell her what your love for her means to you. If you continue using avoidance as the main tactic in your romantic relationships with women, you're going to stunt not only your happiness, but your life. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it's not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it? ~ Cheryl Strayed

Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I'd barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I'd certainly done such things with men based on far less. ~ Cheryl Strayed

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

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

Bagby Hot Springs. ~ Cheryl Strayed