Cheryl Strayed Quotes

The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.

If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.

I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get the same thing... Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same: I want love and I'm afraid I'll never get it. It's hard to answer those letters because I'm an advice columnist, not a fortune-teller. I have words instead of a crystal ball. I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it.

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.

The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

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

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.

I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.

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.

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

Not everyone wants to know everything their partner did. Maybe it's enough to say, "Things aren't going well in our marriage. I've made mistakes. I don't think you've been a good partner to me. How do we go forward together?" I think there's a different answer for every couple. But I think intimacy is asking that question.

Music. I could not go without that. My mind would not let me be without music. I hiked the trail in 1995 - before there were iPods or music on our cell phones or even cell phones. So I was truly out there with just my thoughts. After a few days there was a continuous loop of songs playing silently in my mind.

I am an advocate of honesty and openness, and I think deceit is a dangerous seed to plant and let grow in relationships.

So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.

Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

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

Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.

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.

I really came to literature through poetry.

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

We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her. My whole life sort of ended when my mom died. I had to remake it again and be a new person in the world without my mom. It was a very primal rebirth, that time after my mom died.

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

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

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.

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.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.

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

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

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.

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.

Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.

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.

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us."