Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong.

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn't just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

I want someone special. I want to be loved and to receive love; to have someone there for me. My hunger for this is so great that I fear it's too much to ask anyone for. I'm afraid that if the volunteer coordinator did go out with me, I'd share all this with her at once, and though she'd be compassionate, she'd be scared off because she'd perceive me as needy.

I'd made a plan: I would follow this road wherever it led me. I'd ignore all the others that crossed its path, no matter how intriguing or promising they looked.

One thing I never forgot from my Latin class is that a language that is descended from another language is called a daughter language. It was the beginning of the next era of my life, like this is of yours.

I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please.O

Very nice," said Rick after a while. "Very nice," he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. "What is?" I asked, turning to him, though I knew. "Everything," he said. And it was true.

I'd loved books in my regular, pre- PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. 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.

He pushed on, pillaging my pack, inquiring sternly each time before tossing another item I'd previously deemed necessary into the get-rid-of pile.

It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.

How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life.

It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I'd always tell myself, though I didn't know the meaning of it just yet.

to me sitting alone in Old Station, California, on a picnic table beneath the magnificent sky. I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical.

It was as if I'd finally come across a mountian lion and I'd remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him with my fear.

We should surround ourselves with people who feel like abundance.

When I have something to say that's particularly hard to say, I often write it down first.

I think we underestimate the universe's desire to be kind to us.

I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been "defined by my 'student loan' identity." I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?

That both things could be true at once—my disbelief as well as my certainty—was the unification of the ancient and the future parts of me. It was everything I intended and yet still I was surprised by what I got.

It is, I guess, exactly what you're stuck with if you can't get some perspective on this matter, sweet pea.

suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

Your question to me is about God, but boiled down to its essentials, it's not so different than most of the questions people ask me to answer. It says: This failed me and I want to do better next time . My answer will not be so different either: To do better you're going to have to try .