Quotes from 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.

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.

My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.

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

I really came to literature through poetry.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there

Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't.

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

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

One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it's tedious and monotonous. You're bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head.

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.

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.

I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.

I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.

Jump high and hard with intention and heart.

You get to define the terms of your life.

Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding

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.

My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.

My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.

All of us, as we mature and grow up - if we're doing life right - we evolve.