Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

That was my prayer: Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem.

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What

What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What

The Dream of a Common Language

them. I looked at the place I'd come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me. I was too far from either, so I forced my way forward.

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.

We have to be whole people to find whole love, even if we have to make it up for a while.

there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it. And then there was the real live truly doing it. The staying and doing it, in spite of everything.

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." "But—I think I have already,

Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

I'd reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn't have. I

Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.

You don't have to be broken for me. I didn't have to be broken for him, even though parts of me were. I could be every piece of myself and he'd love me still. My appeal did not rely on my weakness or my need. It relied on everything I was and wanted to be.

Bring the man you aspire to be, the one who already has the love he longs for. Play every piece of yourself and play it with all you've got until you're not playing anymore. That's what Cary Grant did. The lonely boy who lost his mom in the fog of his father's deceit found himself in the magic of wanting to be. His name was Archibald Leach.

was six," I said. "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.

I probably wouldn't have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn't grown up without it.

But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.

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. The

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.

was there in '63, when I was barely eighteen. But now

I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still

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

Bagby Hot Springs.

I'd stopped being grandiose. I'd lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I'd-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book.