Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

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.

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.

Eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself at the age of twenty 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.

because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

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.O

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story

Rise to the occasion of your one and only heart.

Most of the people I met on the PCT passed only briefly through my life, but I was enriched by each of them. They made me laugh they made me think, they made me go on another day, and most of all, they made me trust entirely in the kindness of strangers.

It was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls enchanting the city

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 you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards.

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.

had beloved friends whom I sometimes referred to as family, but our commitments to each other were informal and intermittent, more familial in word than in deed. Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I'd often disputed. But it turned out that it didn't matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.

Just as I'd seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn't have a face.

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

Stop worrying about whether you're fat. You're not fat. Or, rather, you're sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this.

You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.

queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

You asked me when is the right time to tell your lover that you love her and the answer is when you think you love her. That's also the right time to tell her what your love for her means to you. If you continue using avoidance as the main tactic in your romantic relationships with women, you're going to stunt not only your happiness, but your life.

Bastaba con creer que ya no necesitaba tender mis manos desnudas, con saber que ver el pez bajo la superficie era suficiente. Que lo era todo. Era mi vida: como todas las vidas, misteriosa e irrevocable y sagrada. Tan cercana, tan presente, tan mía. Y qué extraordinario era dejarlo estar.

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.

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren't only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

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

Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself. Every last one of us can do better than give up.

That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.