Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

When we see a painting that we love, we're not standing there thinking about the artist who made it — we're thinking about how that painting makes us feel, what that reflects to us about our lives and the world. And so I love when love exceeds … its creator, which is the whole goal of art…; when it becomes not about the person who created it, but about the people who consume it…

I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I'd told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world.

The PCT had taught me what a mile was

When you feel terrible because someone has gotten something you want, you force yourself to remember how very much you have been given. You remember that there is plenty for all of us. You remember that someone else's success has absolutely no bearing on your own.

bottle that was hot as tea. As I hiked, I moaned

Unlike Leif and Karen, who could hardly bear to be in our mother's presence once she got sick, I couldn't bear to be away from her. Plus, I was needed.

Se il coraggio ti è negato va oltre il coraggio.

quitting. But now, only ten days out, I was done. I wanted

They opened my mind to realities I didn't know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much.

An arrow pointed into its center, above which were written the words YOU ARE HERE. This image had become ubiquitous on T-shirts as well as posters and I always felt mildly irritated by it, unsure of how to take it, whether it was meant to be comical or grave, to indicate the largeness of our lives or the insignificance.

They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can't buy.

I wasn't even thinking, What have I gotten myself into? I was thinking only of moving myself forward. My mind was a crystal vase that contained only that one desire. My body was its opposite: a bag of broken glass. Every time I moved, it hurt. I counted my steps to take my mind off the pain, silently ticking the numbers off in my head to one hundred before starting over again. The blocks of numbers made the walk slightly more bearable, as if I only had to go to the end of each one.

Nella vita ci sono un'alba e un tramonto ogni giorno. E tu puoi scegliere di essere presente, puoi metterti sulla strada della bellezza.

once my mother started dying, something inside of me was dead to Paul, no matter what he did or said. ..What did he know about losing anything? His parents were still alive and happily married to each other. My connection with him and his gloriously unfractured life only seemed to increase my pain. It wasn't his fault. Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too. The only person I could bear to be with was the most unbearable person of all: my mother.

La vera sfida è vivere.

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.

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

The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, where we say we love them or not.

clothing that placed them somewhere along the hippy/anarchist/punk rock/funked-out artist continuum.

Z is like a motorcycle with no one on it. Beautiful. Going nowhere.

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.

But the opposite was true. The people in my life were like the Band-Aids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.

This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was.