Cheryl Strayed quotes

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.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Kindness #Warrior #Emotional

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

#Moving Forward #Ideas #Joy

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.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Strong #Journey #Brave

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

#Real #Moving #Love You

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Self #Choices #Unjust

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

#Jobs #Sex #Reading

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

#Mother #Strong #Stars

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

#Believe #Stories #About Yourself

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.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Believe #Kids #Thinking

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

#Simple #Complicated #Made

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Impossible #Nurture #Feels

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

#Light #Risk #Looks

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

#Art #Jobs #Credit

Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Real #Moving #Waste

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Woods #Way #Wilderness

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

#Life #Letting Go #Acceptance

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

#Inspirational

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

#Beautiful #Important #Ships

I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Struggle #Long #New Life

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Running #Dream #Moving

Write like a motherfucker.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Writing

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

#Tree #Branches #Pebbles

Be brave enough to break your own heart.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Heart #Brave #Be Brave

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

#Lonely #Night #Feet

Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Shoes #Would Be #Gender

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

#Change #Effort #Pushing

Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Running #Dream #Bridges

A lot of artists give up because it's just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don't give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They've taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Art #Giving Up #Taken

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I 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

#Names #Darkness #Negative

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

#Way #Yearning #Wanted

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

#Powerful #Philosophy #Sunset

The 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.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Healing #Dark #Light

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

#People #Healthy #Golden

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Letting Go #Morning #Pain

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

#Healing #Miscarriage #Talking

The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Horse #Jobs #Children

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Believe #Believe In Yourself #Hundred

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Bravery #Stories #Born

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

#Way #Causes #Things Happen

People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Writing #Artist #People

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

#Believe #Winning #Fake

The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Writing #Thinking #Giving

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.
-- 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

#Dark #Night #World

The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
-- Cheryl Strayed

#Giving Up #Believe

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

#Book #Writing #Waiting