Cheryl Strayed Quotes

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.

What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.

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.

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

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.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.

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

Write like a motherfucker.

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.

I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.

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

It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.

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.

My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.

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.

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.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.

Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding

You get to define the terms of your life.

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.

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.

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

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

You have to pay your own 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.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.

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.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

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

But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

And every last one of us can do better than give up.

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?

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.

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

"The Dream of a Common Language" by Adrienne Rich. I carried it the entire hike. On my first night, when I felt like I was in too deep, I read the first poem out loud to myself over and over.

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

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

What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?