Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

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.

Go because you want to go. Because wanting to leave is enough.

My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings. There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious decision to actually do it, and then the long third beginning, composed of weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother's grave one last time.

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back.

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

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: ... Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, "Samurai Song" Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL

Writing is hard for every last one of us… 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.

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.

Our minds are small, but our hearts are big.

I was working too hard to be afraid.

We yogied this from day hikers for you.

Women are the ones with the cojones," said Paco as he made a bowl of guacamole. "We guys like to think we're the ones, but we're wrong.

Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "hell is other people," which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other people's boyfriends

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

I think of quotes as mini–instruction manuals for the soul. It

As close as we had been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true.

you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you'll look back in twenty years and howl.

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.

all the things I'd done in my life, of all the versions of myself I'd lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.

I didn't wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn't wash the dreams of my mother away. Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

It's wrong that this is required of you. It's wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.

Acceptance is a small, quiet room.