Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings...

We all love X but want to fuck Z. Z is so gleaming, so crystalline, so unlikely to bitch at you for neglecting to take out the recycling. Nobody has to haggle with Z. Z doesn't wear a watch. Z is like a motorcycle with no one on it. Beautiful. Going nowhere.

There's a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you'll be comforted to hear that you're not alone. Most of us have an invisible inner terrible someone who says all sorts of nutty stuff that has no basis in truth.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from teh one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave.

Perhaps being among the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I, too, could be undesecrated...the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

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

She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

I'm going to be mad at you for the rest of my life.

It's a lie you've told yourself that has flattened down whatever hurts.

I'd made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I'd been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn't prepare me for what would happen next.

It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and scared. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

You did things you didn't hope to do. You have not always been your best self. This means that you're like the rest of us.

These are not pretty things, but they are true things.

boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

We couldn't know, but we were open to knowing. As close as we'd 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.

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 for once / with all my intelligence." It seemed such a radical thought when I first read those lines when I was twenty-two—that love could rise from our deepest, most reasoned intentions rather than our strongest shadowy doubts.

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

Oh, the dream. The goddamned man + baby dream. Written by the High Commission on Heterosexual Love and Sexual Reproduction and practiced by couples across the land, the dream's a bitch if you're a maternally inclined straight female and not living it by the age of thirty-seven -- a situation of a spermicidally toxic flavor. Of course you want to bring out your six-shooter every time you see another bloated mom hoisting up another pinched-faced spawn on Facebook. You want the dream too!

life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You

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.

I could only be who it seemed I had to be.