Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

We've got to live them out in our bodies too. Yours. Mine. Droopy and ugly and fat and thin and marred and wretched as they are. We have to be as fearless about our bellies as we are with our hearts.

But Cheryl wasn't just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isn't some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters—every sin, every regret, every affliction.

Testing yourself means relinquishing the things you believe have so far kept you safe or comfortable

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

You're granting the crazy lady way too much power. Your sorrow and fear has clouded your ability to be reasonable about your mortality. And if you continue in this vein, it's going to rob you of the life you deserve

The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: Your mother would be proud of you.

Difficulty, solitude, and risk are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It's because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance. It forges us out of who we were before into the person we will become.

Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you truly so cowed by adversity?

I told her it would likely go on and shed have to survive it. That she'd have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn't able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever.

I had to do something hard so I could know my strength. I had to do something scary so I could find my courage. I had to do something alone so I could see who I was.

What I know for sure is that freaking out about your student loan debt is useless. You'll be okay. It's only money. And it was money well spent.

I strongly encourage you to let go of these beliefs. They are inaccurate and melodramatic and they do not serve you.

Aside from the people I love, there is little I value more than my education.

The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young," she wrote. "When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother.

Oh, the dream. The goddamned man + baby dream. Written by the High Commission on Heterosexual Love and Sexual Reproduction and practised by couples across the land, the dream's a bitch if you're a maternally inclined straight female and not living it by the age of thirty-seven - a situation of a spermicidally toxic flavour.

That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own, personal "educational opportunities." They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth.

She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

your sister was attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up.

In this sense, she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

that 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.

WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.

She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.

Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.