Cheryl Strayed Quotes

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.

I really came to literature through poetry.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

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

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

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

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

Be fearless enough to let love transform you.

What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

Grief doesn't have a face.

A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone.

There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

Very nice, " said Rick after a while. "Very nice, " he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. "What is?" I asked, turning to him, though I knew. "Everything, " he said. And it was true.

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

You've earned the right to grow. You're going to have to carry the water yourself.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: ... Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.

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

The sky didn't wonder where it was.

It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there

When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.

He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again.

It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.