Cheryl Strayed Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

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

Cheryl Strayed
No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.

Cheryl Strayed
You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.

Cheryl Strayed
It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.

Cheryl Strayed
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?

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't between them anymore, maybe she could love him again.

Cheryl Strayed
My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

Cheryl Strayed
I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. 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. It's the reason... we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

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

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

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

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
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.

Cheryl Strayed
It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
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.

Cheryl Strayed
When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn't mean anything because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.

Cheryl Strayed
Wounded? was all I could manage. Yes, said Pat. And you're wounded in the same place. That's what fathers do if they don't heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

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
Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.

Cheryl Strayed
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

Cheryl Strayed