Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked.

The father's job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it's necessary to do so. If you don't get that from your father, you have to teach yourself." O

I didn't look like a woman who might need twelve condoms.

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

attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

Until, that is, a tree stopped me in my path.

If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

You dont have the 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...

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.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild.

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.

The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives.

it with their fingers out of my hands,

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.

He was a nice guy, I decided, when I glanced at the bumper of his car. On it, there was a green sticker that said IMAGINE WHIRLED PEAS. Has there ever been a serial killer who imagined whirled peas?

People want to help I woman alone. Or try to get in her pants.

I felt better than I'd ever felt in all of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel.

How wild it is, to let it be.

There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time fore once / with all my intelligence.

Reading's my reward at the end of the day,

By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I've never been.

You should see a therapist, everyone had told me after my mother died, and ultimately—in the depths of my darkest moments the year before the hike—I had. But I didn't keep the faith. I never did call the other therapist Vince had recommended. I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

was who I was: the same woman who pulsed beneath the bruise of her old life, only now I was somewhere else.