Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

Someone's in here," I called, though that was obvious. Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.

The air came alive with the sound of the wind whipping the trees at times and at other times it was profoundly hushed by the endless silencing snow. Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn't wonder where it was.

He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.

I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.

life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

I'd been on the PCT for a little more than a month. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.

Here it could be the fourth of July or the tenth of December. These mountains didn't count the days. The

open with my knife. Inside, carefully wrapped

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.

This is not how your story ends. It's simply where it takes a turn you didn't expect.

it was enough to trust that what I'd done was true.

We are here to build the house.

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 sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?

stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

Heridas?" -fue lo único que conseguí decir. "Sí" -afirmó Pat- "Y tú tienes esas heridas en el mismo sitio. Eso es lo que hacen los padres si no curan sus propias heridas. Hieren a sus hijos en el mismo sitio.

I didn't want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I'd made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I'd wronged him.

So much had been denied me, I reasoned. Why should I deny myself?

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.

But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding.

all the women who wanted to be hobos were holed up in some house with a gaggle of children to raise. Children who'd been fathered by hobo men who'd hit the road.

I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right. I

Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with sitting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our lives, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there. Acceptance speaks in the gentlest voice. It commands only that we acknowledge what's true.

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.