Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN Tell

She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

But the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.

ou let time pass. That's the cure . You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun and you close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you're okay.

The question isn't whether you should stay or go. The question is: How would your life be transformed if you choose to love this time with all your intelligence?

He seemed like someone I'd always known even if I never saw him again.

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

We'd have long conversations during which I'd weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn't hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything?

All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.

when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained.

How can a book describe the psychological factors a person must prepare for . . . the despair, the alienation, the anxiety and especially the pain, both physical and mental, which slices to the very heart of the hiker's volition, which are the real things that must be planned for? No words can transmit those factors . . .

It would turn out to be the last full day of her life, and for most of it she held her eyes still and open, neither sleeping nor waking, intermittently lucid and hallucinatory.

These things are your becoming.

I can't do this," he kept repeating through his tears. "I can't live without Mom. I can't. I can't. I can't." "We have to," I replied, though I couldn't believe it myself.

This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

You're clear that you don't want to act on your crush, so trust that clarity and be grateful that you have it.

I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.

ucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. 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. Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky.

So I started in, but I could not go on. Each word I spoke erased itself in the air.

She'd been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.

walked on, thinking about the newspaper article I'd recently come across about three women in California—each one had been killed by a mountain lion on separate occasions over the past year—and