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Cheryl Strayed Quotes
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.
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The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
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In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.
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You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.
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I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
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I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.
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Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
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The other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
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You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding and my dear one, you and I have been granted a mighty generous one.
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Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
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Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.
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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.
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Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
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What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
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Quote of the day
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
Cheryl Strayed
Born:
September 17, 1968
(age 55)
Bio:
Cheryl Strayed is an American memoirist, novelist, and essayist. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in national magazines and anthologies.
Known for:
Brave Enough (2015)
Torch (2002)
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