Cheryl Strayed Quotes

Enjoy the top 463 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Cheryl Strayed.

“They realized that, in fact, the lie wasnt safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.”
— Cheryl Strayed —

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and "loaded with promises and commitments" that we may or may not want or keep.
The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother-even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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.

— Cheryl Strayed

“Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I'd often disputed. But it turned out that it didn't matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— 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

“I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

“Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be "over" your daughter's death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such
things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of
those people believe they're being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to
push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it
comes to healing the pain of your daughter's death.
They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!”

— Cheryl Strayed

“The body knows. When your heart sinks. When you feel sick to your gut. When something blossoms in your chest. When your brain gloriously pops. That's your body telling you the One True Thing. Listen to it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. The bull, I acknowledged grimly, could be in either direction, since I hadn't seen where he'd run once I closed my eyes. I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and 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. Therapists and friends can help you along the way, but the healing-the genuine healing, the actual real-deal, down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change-is entirely and absolutely up to you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“They're tortured by indecision and guilt and lust. They love X but want to fuck Z. It is the plight of almost every monogamous person at one time or another. We all love X but want to fuck Z.”

— 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

“They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn't safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.”

— 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

“My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Most of the people I met on the PCT passed only briefly through my life, but I was enriched by each of them. They made me laugh they made me think, they made me go on another day, and most of all, they made me trust entirely in the kindness of strangers.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Just as I'd seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn't have a face.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Our minds are small, but our hearts are big.”

— Cheryl Strayed

These are not pretty things, but they are true things.

— Cheryl Strayed

“When I wasn't internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I'd heard over the course of my life - bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad.”

— 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

“You're clear that you don't want to act on your crush, so trust that clarity and be grateful that you have it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

In that uncertain period when Paul and I had been separated for several months but were not yet sure we wanted to get divorced, we sat down together to scan a set of no-fault, do-it-yourself divorce documents we'd ordered over the phone, as if holding them in our hands would help us decide what to do. As we paged through the documents, we came across a question that asked the name we'd each have after the divorce. The line beneath the question was perfectly blank. On it, to my amazement, we could write anything. Be anyone.

— Cheryl Strayed

Stop worrying about whether you're fat. You're not fat. Or rather, you're sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.

— Cheryl Strayed

“It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. (207)”

— Cheryl Strayed

“Clothing that placed them somewhere along the hippy/anarchist/punk rock/funked-out artist continuum.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“We talk about our friends behind their backs. We do. Ask any social scientist who has studies human communication behaviors. Even you edmitted to doing this. Our friends are witnese to our attributes and flaws, our bad habits and good qualities, our contradictions and our contrivances. That they need to occasionally discuss the negative aspects or our lives and personalities in terms less than admiring is to be expected.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“That you're so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you're here to do. And when people are here to do that, they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart. So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker. Yours,”

— 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

“I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing.”