Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

A proclamation of love is not inherently "loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.

The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker

What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.

think 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.

He wasn't delusional or ill or giving into age-induced dementia. He was my father. The man he'd always been. And he was talking to me as if I was his daughter. As if he had a right. But he didn't.

Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word "love" to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

I am not afraid

We talk about our friends behind their backs. We do. Ask any social scientist who has studies human communication behaviors. Even you edmitted to doing this. Our friends are witnese to our attributes and flaws, our bad habits and good qualities, our contradictions and our contrivances. That they need to occasionally discuss the negative aspects or our lives and personalities in terms less than admiring is to be expected.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering.

He was once so struck by something I said to him in the course of an argument that he immediately wrote it on a scrap of paper and stuck it to our refrigerator, where it stayed for nearly a decade. The quote? I'm going to be mad at you for the rest of my life.

Never give in,

So many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

There was no mother at our college graduations. There was no mother at our weddings. There was no mother when we sold our first books. There was no mother when our children were born. There was no mother, ever, at any turn for either one of us in our entire adult lives and there never will be. The same is true for

The sketches of your real life and your sister life are right there before you and you get to decide what to do. One is the life you'll have; the other is the one you won't. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won't let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?

But I encourage you to swallow your pride and hear your friends out, to look at the image of yourself they're reflecting back to you. It might be useful. It might piss you off.

No is golden. No is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will. I have learned this over and over and over again.

Yes. There is something I can offer that will help. I can tell you to get yourself out of that house. You mustn't live with people who wish to annihilate you. Even if you love them.

that it's devastating for a child to hear one parent speak ill of the other. In fact, so much so that the researchers found it was less psychologically damaging if a parent said directly to the child You are a worthless piece of shit than it was for a parent to say Your mother/father is a worthless piece of shit.

But I encourage you to swallow your pride and hear your friends our, to look at the image of yourself they're reflecting back to you It might be useful. It might piss you off. It might help you get over the tender feelings you have about what happened at the cabin. The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.

The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore. ? Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle

the work you do each day matters. Even if it's work that seems invisible. Even if it's work that doesn't lead to the outcome you hoped for. Even if others attempt to undo your work.