Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime.

When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.

just close your eyes and remember everything you already know.

Anything else? To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.

Divorcing him is the most excruciating decision I've ever made. But it was the wisest one too. And I wasn't the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn't have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear. To leave him was a kindness of a sort, though it didn't seem that way at the time.

How has your sense of despair contributed to your desire to positively impact your community? How have you countered ugliness by bringing beauty and hope to others through your work? In what ways has your rage, sorrow, and fear illuminated the path forward as you make change in the world? How might you embrace the less-desirable feelings you have about the meaning of your work so they can serve rather than stop you?

Why? Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.

Podría interesarte saber, por ejemplo, que la palabra «prestigioso» deriva del término latino prestigiae, que significa «truco de prestidigitación». ¿No te parece interesante? La utilizamos para referirnos a lo honorable y lo valorado, pero esta palabra remite a la ilusión, el engaño, a las falsas impresiones.

It's one of the hardest things you'll ever have to do. And you're going to bawl your head off doing it. But I promise you it will be okay. Your tears will be born of grief, but also of relief. You will be better for them. They will make you harder, softer, cleaner, dirtier. Free. A glorious something else awaits.

Of this I am absolutely sure: Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you'd done in your youth. I know too many people who didn't do those things. They all end up mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.

Small things such as this have saved me: How much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.

Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it.

He said, "Don't get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don't need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don't have to be broken for me.

To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

Your sense of despair about the meaning of your work sustains itself only if you believe the narrowest version of the story—the one that assumes your contribution to the greater good can be measured by only one result.

You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

Practice saying the word "love" to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

The truest story is always the widest one. It's the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.

You're generally less humble in that decade than you'll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear.

One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It's like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.

I happen to believe America is dying of loneliness, and we as people have are into the stream of convenience and turn away from our deep lives.

It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there

To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.