Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

As I passed them, I felt the presence of my mother so acutely that I had the sensation that she was there; once I even paused to look around for her before I could go on.

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

La solitudine era sempre stata un luogo reale per me, come se fosse una stanza dove potevo rifugiarmi per essere davvero me stessa.

The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.O

I'd thought I'd weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey.

The trees were tall, but I was taller

As I read, I could feel my mother's presence so acutely, her absence so profoundly, that it was hard to focus on the words.

But the people who don't give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They've taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too

anything could happen and that everything would. But that doesn't mean I wasn't shocked when it did.

I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, "Samurai Song

The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.

Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional,

the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.

The answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right-wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we're angry or scared or in pain. We are a complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.

There's nothing you can tell Sugar that doesn't strike her as beautiful and human. Which is why men and women write to her about intimacies they can't share with anyone else, unspeakable urges, insoluble grief. She understands that 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.

God was a ruthless bitch.

It didn't matter whether someone came along anyway. I was in this alone. I

Yes, I'd been a loving daughter and yes, I'd been there for her when it mattered, but I could have been better. I could have been what I'd begged her to say I was: the best daughter in the world.

The words are purposes. The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, "Diving into the Wreck" Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, "California

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets.

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success.

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.

Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.

a quote on page 6 by a fellow named Charles Long, with whom the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California heartily agreed, that said, "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 …