Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.

That was my father: the man who hadn't fathered me. It amazed me every time. Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the way he should have had always been the wildest thing of all.

You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. Anyone who expects you to has no sense of the arts.

I'd never had a mind for math. I simply couldn't hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

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 knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that.

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 or economics or science or the arts.

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. 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. I have learned this over and over and over again.

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.

Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me—just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves.

I've given you everything,' she insisted again and again in her last days. 'Yes,' I agreed. She did. She did. She did. She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

You might, for example, be interested to know that the word "prestigious" is derived from the Latin praestigiae, which means "conjuror's tricks." Isn't that interesting? This word that we use to mean honorable and esteemed has its beginnings in a word that has everything to do with illusion, deception, and trickery.

I didn't exactly want to get divorced. I didn't exactly not want to. I believed in almost equal measure both that divorcing Paul was the right thing to do and that by doing so I was destroying the best thing I had. By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I'd never been.

I had arrived. I'd done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I'd always tell myself though I didn't know the meaning of it just yet.

A mountain that's had its very heart removed.

Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and waterr and to be able to pt my backpack down

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

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart. If you let it, your jealousy will devour you.

Be present for your own life.

hen it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair. If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we've fallen. Remembering that is the most important work we can

Would it ring? It would not ring. Should you call? You should not call. But you always called. You couldn't help but call because your heart was crushed and you thought maybe if you talked it out ONE MORE TIME the person who crushed your heart would change his/her mind and uncrush it.

There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

I'm also reminded of how those words no longer belong only to me; how, when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.

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