Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

planting a root in the very center of my rootlessness.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You

The words are purposes. The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, "Diving into the Wreck

The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

IMAGINE WHIRLED PEAS

Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun.

Not because I couldn't find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother's life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch. The

Letting go of expectation when it comes to one's children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

There are so many amazing things in this world... I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn't let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead.

The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.

Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get to be junk.

When I say you don't have to explain what you're going to do with your life, I'm not suggesting you lounge around whining about how difficult it is. I'm suggesting you apply yourself in directions for which we have no accurate measurement. I'm talking about work. And love.

Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright--to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

Every evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from the vastness itself.

I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face.

Heroin had made me dumb and distant from myself. A thought would form and then evaporate. I could not quite get ahold of my mind, even when I wasn't high.

I was lost but I was not afraid,

So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless.