Cheryl Strayed Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

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

Cheryl Strayed
I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please.

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

Cheryl Strayed
I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.

Cheryl Strayed
There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.

Cheryl Strayed
I think of quotes as mini-instruction manuals for the soul.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

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

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

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
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.

Cheryl Strayed
I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.

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

Cheryl Strayed
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

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

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

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 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.

Cheryl Strayed
I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed