Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

If your Nerve, deny you – Go above your Nerve – EMILY DICKINSON

Hoe wild het is, om alles te accepteren zoals het zich voordoet.

So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

when I removed my first aid kit from my pack and opened it up, all of my Band-Aids blew away.

The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center.

For whatever it is that is less than mercy; for what we don't even have a word for. Those were the worst days, I believed at the time, and yet the moment she died I'd have given anything to have them back. One small, horrible, glorious day after the other.

Kennedy Meadows

I prayed and prayed, and then I faltered. Not because I couldn't find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother's life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch.

But the thing was, I didn't want it. Maybe I never really had. I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.

One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me.

I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I

La paura genera paura. La forza genera forza.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I

Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time.

You are the agent of power in your sex life, even if what you want is to relinquish your power and agency while you're having sex. You can take that power back at any moment. Which means, of course, that you always had it.

Where was my mother? I wondered. I'd carried her so long, staggering beneath her weight. On the other side of the river, I let myself think. And something inside of me released.

Do you like to read?" Christine asked. "That's what we do when we come up here. That's our idea of relaxation.

a prayer marched through my head, though prayer is not the right word to describe that march. I wasn't humble before God. I didn't even believe in God. My prayer was not: Please, God, take mercy on us. I

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives.

A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.

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 a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.

I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life. I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me.

What this requires of us is that we don't get tangled up in the living, even when we in fact feel woefully tangled up. It demands that we focus not only on what's happening in our stories, but also what our stories are about.