Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought.

It's reality. And reality is what we have to accept, like it or not.

It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do.

Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I'd come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn't feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn't me against it. We two were one.

I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really—all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.

Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, "California

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay.

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. 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.

And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity.

I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady's strong back, finally leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make.

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

I was bypassing the High Sierra—missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses

In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large:

that I didn't have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world. They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it,

was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter,

There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding. And, dear one, you and I both were granted a mighty generous hand.

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable.

But I had walked here, and I wasn't ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra just yet.

slices to the very heart of the hiker's volition,

Dónde estaba mi madre?, me pregunté. Había cargado con ella durante mucho tiempo, tambaleándome bajo su peso. «Al otro lado del río», me permití pensar. Y algo dentro de mí se liberó. En

So I stood up and tossed the other one over the edge too.