Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

Of course, heroin could be had there too, I thought. But the thing was, I didn't want it. Maybe I never really had. 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.O

Appalled by a culture that spent "too much time sitting on soft seats in motors, too much sitting in soft seats in movies,

An REI worker had encouraged me to buy a box of Spenco 2nd Skin—gel patches meant to treat burns that also happened to be great for blisters.

There was nothing to do but go on.

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.

This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine.

I felt it in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.

My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn't.

Because there is something worse than the I-can't-live-without-her heartbreak hellspace you're in right now, Afraid. It's spending your life with a partner who, at her or his deepest core, does not want to be with you. It's accepting a reluctant half love for fear that's all you can get or deserve. It's dangling eternally in doubt. It's believing that a lie will keep you safe and the truth is where the danger lies.

He reminded me of all the golden boys I'd known in my life- classically handsome and charmingly sure of his place at the very top of the heap, confident that the world was his and that he was safe in it, without ever having considered otherwise.

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. I

But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn't mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again.

I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on.

I'd imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I'd thought I'd weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.

Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do -- have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.

Sometimes those we forgive change their behavior to the extent that we can eventually be as close to them as we were before (or even closer).

He was the first person I'd met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn't need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

The same as she'd always done when she'd seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were.

I stopped at the door where the racks of Snapples were kept. I put my hand to the glass near the bottles of lemonade—there was both yellow and pink. They were like diamonds or pornography. I could look, but I couldn't touch.

Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I'd never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

I was intrigued. I was unattached. In my youth and sorrow, I was ready to self-destruct. So