Strayed Cheryl Quotes & Sayings

As with the mountains, there'd been no deserts where I grew up, and though I'd gone on day hikes in a couple of them, I didn't really understand what deserts were. I'd taken them to be dry, hot, and sandy places full of snakes, scorpions, and cactuses. They were not that. They were that and also a bunch of other things. They were layered and complex and inexplicable and analogous to nothing. My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail. I was in entirely new terrain. — Cheryl Strayed

The point is, Johnny, you get to say. You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings for this woman. You get to describe the particular kind of oh-shit-I-didn't-mean-to-fall-in-love-but-I-sorta-did love you appear to have for her. — Cheryl Strayed

This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing process. — Cheryl Strayed

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

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. 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

Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that. — Cheryl Strayed

Each and every one of them had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you'll crucify me for it. — Cheryl Strayed

I'd entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan. — Cheryl Strayed

I know it's hard to write, darling. But it's harder not to. The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. — Cheryl Strayed

You are the agent of power in your sex life, even if what you want is to relinquish your power and agency while you're having sex. You can take that power back at any moment.
Which means, of course, that you always had it. — 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

We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap. — Cheryl Strayed

An REI worker had encouraged me to buy a box of Spenco 2nd Skin - gel patches meant to treat burns that also happened to be great for blisters. — Cheryl Strayed

The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. — Cheryl Strayed

One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me. — Cheryl Strayed

A caldera, it's called - a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that's had its very heart removed. — Cheryl Strayed

The other half of rising - the very half that makes rising necessary - is having been nailed to the cross. — Cheryl Strayed

The same as she'd always done when she'd seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were. — Cheryl Strayed

my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. — Cheryl Strayed

Hen you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? The word for that is healing. — Cheryl Strayed

Our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending. — Cheryl Strayed

It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that. — Cheryl Strayed

wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She — Cheryl Strayed

It felt ancient. Knowing. Utterly and profoundly indifferent to me. — Cheryl Strayed

When the path reveals itself, follow it. — Cheryl Strayed

This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times. — Cheryl Strayed

It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been. — Cheryl Strayed

I'd loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When — Cheryl Strayed

it with their fingers out of my hands, — Cheryl Strayed

You've made it so long without your sweet boy and now you can't take it anymore. But you can. You must. — 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

You're asking," I said. "I've always been the one to end — Cheryl Strayed

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer - and yet also, like most things, so very simple - was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. 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. — Cheryl Strayed

You don't have to be young. You don't have to be thin. You don't have to be "hot" in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don't have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits. You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, "I'm right here." There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It's the one place we can't leave. We're there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn't, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn't do that? That's the question you need to answer, — Cheryl Strayed

So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. — Cheryl Strayed

I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe. — Cheryl Strayed

IMAGINE WHIRLED PEAS — 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

Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill. — Cheryl Strayed

Suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us. — Cheryl Strayed

Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time. — 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

I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things. — Cheryl Strayed

Fountains of inconvenient feeling - and toward the frantic enticements of — Cheryl Strayed

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives - those fountains of inconvenient feeling - and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick. — Cheryl Strayed

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work. — Cheryl Strayed

It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are. — Cheryl Strayed

I didn't want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I'd made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I'd wronged him. — Cheryl Strayed

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself. — Cheryl Strayed

I was trying to find a new home in the world. — Cheryl Strayed

We didn't exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two. — Cheryl Strayed

I've given you everything," she insisted again and again in her last days. "Yes," I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love. — Cheryl Strayed

But I encourage you to swallow your pride and hear your friends out, to look at the image of yourself they're reflecting back to you. It might be useful. It might piss you off. — Cheryl Strayed

The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way. — Cheryl Strayed

The question about who you will love and when you will love him is out of your hands. It's a mystery that you can't solve. — Cheryl Strayed

I was a terrible believer in things, I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was just as searching as I was skeptical. — Cheryl Strayed

One of the scandalous things I did was as I read them afterward I would burn them. I loved them, but for practical reasons I had to lighten the load. I burned favorites, like William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." There's a whole list in the back of my book. It's me,[Adolf] Hitler, [Benito] Mussolini, and Pol Pot. We're the book burners. — Cheryl Strayed

The PCT had taught me what a mile was. — Cheryl Strayed

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

Open with my knife. Inside, carefully wrapped — Cheryl Strayed

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid. — Cheryl Strayed

That place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. It's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it. — Cheryl Strayed

But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn't mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong. — 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

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own. — Cheryl Strayed

In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. — Cheryl Strayed

There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story. — 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

A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened. — Cheryl Strayed

By the way," I said, "I wanted to tell you - about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced. I was married and not long ago I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died - she was only forty-five and she got cancer suddenly and died. It's been a hard time in my life and I've sort of gotten offtrack. So I ... " He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. "I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here." I made a crumpled gesture with my hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I'd let so many tumble out. — 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

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

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 got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink. 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

We often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first. — Cheryl Strayed

Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn't think I could do that. — Cheryl Strayed

I didn't exactly want to get divorced. I didn't exactly not want to. I believed in almost equal measure both that divorcing Paul was the right thing to do and that by doing so I was destroying the best thing I had. By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I'd never been. — Cheryl Strayed

There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time fore once / with all my intelligence. — Cheryl Strayed

The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky. — Cheryl Strayed

Grief doesn't have a face. — Cheryl Strayed

On my hike my brain was left to wander. That was often maddening because it was tedious and monotonous sometimes, but then my the mind would take over, and that's when I'd start hearing the music in my head or thinking deeply about people I know or things that I didn't even know I remembered anymore. Those thoughts would be there. I wouldn't have had them otherwise. — Cheryl Strayed

It's funny, it never occurred to me that a movie star would play me. But now that she [Reese Witherspoon] is playing me, it's like, of course, it couldn't be anyone else! I don't know if you've seen pictures of Reese and me and Reese and my daughter Bobbi, who's named after my mother, and also plays me. There's a kind of resemblance. — Cheryl Strayed

You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don't, it's a living death. You're just standing in one place dying. — Cheryl Strayed

Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It's one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. — Cheryl Strayed

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. — Cheryl Strayed

Romantic love is not a competitive sport. — Cheryl Strayed

I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living. — Cheryl Strayed

But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really - all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. — Cheryl Strayed

Jump high and hard with intention and heart. — Cheryl Strayed

We do not have the right to feel helpless. We must help ourselves. After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives. — Cheryl Strayed

Withholding distorts reality. — Cheryl Strayed

And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time - it could be years from now - when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior. — Cheryl Strayed

And the fuck is yours too, WTF. That question does not apply 'to everything every day.' If it does, you're wasting your life. If it does, you're a lazy coward and you are not a lazy coward.
Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it. — Cheryl Strayed

The good things aren't a movie. There isn't enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There — Cheryl Strayed

I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo. — Cheryl Strayed

It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I'd begun my hike, I hadn't shed a single tear. — Cheryl Strayed

So on one hand, because the wilderness was familiar to me, it really helped me be brave. But it still was scary sometimes. I had to say to myself: "Chances are, you're not going to be mauled by a bear." — Cheryl Strayed

You don't need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn't mean you're incapable of real love or that you'll never love anyone else again. It doesn't mean you're morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That's all. Be brave enough to break your own heart. — Cheryl Strayed

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. — Cheryl Strayed

I mean: be your best, most gigantic self. — Cheryl Strayed