Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind.

Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

I)t was Lady who saved my mother's life. Lady, who made it possible for her not only to walk away from my father, but also to keep going. Horses were my mother's religion. It was them she wanted to be with all those Sundays as a child, when she'd been made to put on dresses to go to mass.

Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn't wonder where it was.

I hope you can do that someday with someone else," I said when he didn't reply, though the very thought of that someone else pierced my heart. "I hope you can too," he said. I sat in the darkness beside him, wanting to believe that I was capable of finding the kind of love I had with him again, only without wrecking it the next time around. It felt impossible to me.

Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.

Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with sitting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our life, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there.

Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word "love" to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

The thought of my youthful lack of humility made me nauseous now. I had been an arrogant asshole and, in the midst of that, my mother died.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid. When

She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

This isn't about strength," said Pat. "And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time—it could be years from now—when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.

Eu tinha muita dificuldade em acreditar nas coisas, mas também tinha a maior dificuldade em não acreditar. Era tão curiosa quanto cética.

The void? I'd asked," crestfallen. "It's a good thing," she said. "It's the place where things are born, where they begin, Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive.

Burn me," she said finally. "Turn me to ash." And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I'd expected. They weren't like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they'd once been bones.

The question about who you will love and when you will love him is out of your hands. It's a mystery that you can't solve.

It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds,

I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.

There wasn't a day on the trail when that monotony didn't ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way to a hundred and starting over again at one. Each time I completed another set it seemed as if I'd achieved a small thing. Then a hundred became too optimistic and I went to fifty, then twenty-five, then ten.

What is hiking but walking, after all ?

You must love in order to be loved. You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included. You must give in order to receive.

It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn't even know I wanted until I didn't get it.

I'm not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn't feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn't entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.