Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again.

She loved horses and Hank Williams and had a best friend named Babs.

Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Ultimatums have negative connotations for many because they're often used by bullies and abusers, who tend to be comfortable pushing their partners' backs against a wall, demanding that he or she choose this or that, all or nothing. But when used by emotionally healthy people with good intentions, ultimatums offer a respectful and loving way through an impasse that will sooner or later destroy a relationship on its own anyway.

Your ultimatum is simple. It's fair. And it's stating your own intentions, not what you hope theirs will be.

We didn't exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.

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 I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave.

There is always a sunrise and always a sunset. It's up to you to be there for it, my mom said a million years ago, when she was alive. I rolled my eyes then, a million years ago. Now I live my life by it.

Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

He hadn't loved

you gain. Trust yourself. It's Sugar's golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this—the hardest thing I'd ever done. I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

Oregón! —exclamó, y casi me dejé arrastrar por el júbilo de su voz, casi me llevó a creer que esos 320 kilómetros eran coser y cantar, pero de sobra sabía que no era así. Para mí, todas y cada una de las semanas en el sendero habían sido un suplicio. —Oregón —admití,

I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

I'm sorry," she said and reached over and squeezed his leg. She couldn't help but think that she'd ruined his life. It didn't yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.

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.

She was kindhearted and forgiving, generous and naïve.

I came up with another reason to bolster my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea.

I prayed to the whole wide universe and hoped that God would be in it, listening to me.

I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail this darkly.

I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing.

That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I'd lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me.

A room with a view!" my mother exclaimed, though she was too weak to rise and see the lake herself. And then more quietly she said: "All of my life I've waited for a room with a view.

My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.