Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants.

At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the bottom of a deep well.

It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me.

The sky didn't wonder where it was.

It was all unknown to me then...everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I'd done was true....It was my life--like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.

As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn't put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be.

He didn't do anything. I'm the one. I broke my own heart.

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? …What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

Withholding distorts reality.

When you're speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.

Who is tougher than me? No one.

By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn't begrudge my mother a thing. The truth was, in spite of all that, she'd been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot.

Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL

When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, "Samurai Song

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. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

I'd loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When

Each and every one of them had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you'll crucify me for it.

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It's good you've worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

waiting for a friend to get off

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose.

I grew up and left home for college in the Twin Cities at a school called St. Thomas,