Cheryl Strayed Wild Quotes & Sayings

It was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls enchanting the city — Cheryl Strayed

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life. — Anthony Marra

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us." — Cheryl Strayed

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with 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. — Cheryl Strayed

The soul is like an uninhabited world
that comes to life only when
God lays His head
against us. — Thomas Aquinas

Shared suffering, she'd found, was no guarantee of intimacy. — Michel Faber

My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty. — 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

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. — Cheryl Strayed

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich; Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout; My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir; The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin; The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader by Rees Hughes and Corey Lewis; Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls; A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. — Cheryl Strayed

I always let my husband read the script so he knows what's about to happen to his wife. When I played Cheryl Strayed in Wild, I'd get really mad about certain things, I'd say really profound things, and I'd curse out of nowhere. He'd say, "Are you you, or are you Cheryl?" — Reese Witherspoon

How wild it was, to let it be. — Cheryl Strayed

How wild it is, to let it be. — Cheryl Strayed

I actually don't have any fear of people reading Wild and going out unprepared. Because one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I went out unprepared. And when you really think about it, all I did wrong was that I took too much stuff, which is the most common backpacker mistake. The part that I wasn't prepared for is the part you can't prepare for. — Cheryl Strayed

At least 200 dates have been suggested, varying from 3483 to 6934 years B.C., all based on the supposition that the Bible enables us to settle the point. But it does nothing of the sort. The literal interpretation has now been entirely abandoned; and the world is admitted to be of immense antiquity. On such questions we have no Biblical evidence, and the Catholic is quite free to follow the teaching of science. — Thomas Murasso

On matters beyond his ken a gentleman speaks with caution. If names are not right, words are misused. When words are misused, affairs go wrong. When affairs go wrong, courtesy and music droop, law and justice fail. And when law and justice fail them, a people can move neither hand nor foot. So a gentleman must be ready to put names in speech, to put words into deeds. A gentleman is nowise careless of words. — Confucius

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. 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

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn't just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. — Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss. — Mira Bartok

I looked north, in its direction - the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking. — Cheryl Strayed

Saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before. — Cheryl Strayed

My point is that we much decolonize our minds and re-name and re-define ourselves ... In all respects, culturally, politically, socially, we must re-define ourselves and our lives, in our own terms. — Max Roach

Older Fags and Younger Fags, Like Legally Young. Daddies. Zeus and Ganymede.
Ganymede was a child, Ziggy schooled her.
Yeah, You Were There, Michelle retorted, On Mount Olympus. You Were Working the Door. You Carded Ganymede. — Michelle Tea

The bullet hit Lady right between her eyes, in the middle of her white star, exactly where we hoped it would. She bolted so hard her leather halter snapped into pieces and fell away from her face, and then she stood unmoving, looking at us with a stunned expression.
"Shoot her again," I gasped, and immediately Leif did, firing three more bullets into her head in quick succession. She stumbled and jerked, but she didn't fall and she didn't run, though she was no longer tied to the tree. Her eyes were wild upon us, shocked by what we'd done, her face a constellation of bloodless holes. In an instant I knew we'd done the wrong thing, not in killing her, but in thinking that we should be the ones to do it. I should have insisted Eddie do this one thing, or paid for the veterinarian to come out. I'd had the wrong idea of what it takes to kill an animal. There is no such thing as one clean shot. — 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