Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it's particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here to Serve button has been eternally pinned. We're expected to nurture and give by the very virtue of our femaleness, to consider other people's feelings and needs before our own.

you must trust your truest truth, even though there are other truths running alongside it

You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to.

I can't help but quote the former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who quite wisely said: "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we're brave enough to touch the rawesr, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without paues and see - thrillingly, terrifyingly - that it was never her we had to fear. It war always only us.

my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away.

you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.

More will be revealed. Your son hasn't yet taught you everything he has to teach you. He taught you how to love like you've never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you've never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach

You don't need a reason to leave.

You've earned the right to grow. You're going to have to carry the water yourself.

You listed the three options you believe you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you're fucked before you begin.

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It's the one place we can't leave. We're there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn't, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn't do that?

If you take that risk, if you take that chance, if you tell the truest, hardest, deepest story you have within you, you're not going to step into the light and find that you're there alone. That you're going to be surrounded by people who are there with you.

But now I could see the line between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too. Before I left, I hadn't calculated how much my journey would reasonably be expected to cost and saved up that amount plus enough to be my cushion against unexpected expenses. If I'd done that, I wouldn't have been here, eighty-some days out

When you're single and in your twenties, having sex with whoever comes along is practically your job. It's biological. It's emotional. It's psychological. It's egomaniacal.

Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

on the PCT, broke, but okay—getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable person would have said I couldn't afford to do it.

It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we're brave enough to touch the rawest, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without pause and see—thrillingly, terrifyingly—that it was never her we had to fear. It was always only us.

Adrienne Rich … did not die a woman who denied that her wounds came from the same source as her power. In fact, she spent her life making power from those wounds [but] Marie Curie… didn't have that luxury — she had to deny that in order to be who she was in her time. But we don't. And I think so much of the work I've done … and the work I hope I continue to do, is about writing into those wounds.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives.

That your friends have those opinions, however, does not mean that they don't love you or value you as a friend or otherwise think you are one of the best people they know.

We act as if we don't know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that's changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.

The only way to override your limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude is to produce.