Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true

You say your marriage is "loveless" and perhaps you're correct that your relationship has come to its natural end, but I'd like you to consider the notion that you aren't the best judge of that right now. You're a psychologically distressed drug addict with four kids, no health insurance, uncertain business prospects, and a pile of bills. I wouldn't expect your marriage to be thriving. I doubt you've been

we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

He had no words for it, what made him, what pained him, what rocked him and fucked him.

What are your spiritual beliefs? I do not believe in God as most people conceive of God, but I believe there is a divine spirit in each of us. I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.

When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn't have written my book before I did. I simply wasn't capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties.

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.

My two grown sons, ages thirty-five and twenty-three, have returned to the nest, my home. They didn't ask. They simply showed up.

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It's strength. It's nerve. And "if your Nerve, deny you—," as Emily Dickinson wrote, "go above your Nerve." Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

The point is, Johnny, you get to say. You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings for this woman. You get to describe the particular kind of oh-shit-I-didn't-mean-to-fall-in-love-but-I-sorta-did love you appear to have for her.

all right is almost always where we eventually land, even if we fuck up entirely along the way.

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

Not a single one of us knows what the future holds. The unexpected happens even when we've got everything mapped out.

Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.

Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

I've found that the men worth fucking are far more good-natured about the female body in its varied forms than is generally acknowledged. 'Naked and smiling' is one male friend's only (physical) requirement for a lover.

Sometimes those we forgive continue being the jackasses that they always were and we accept them while keeping them approximately three thousand miles away from our wedding receptions.

There is a world of people out there who will love you for who you are. A whole, vibrant, fucked-up, happy, conflicted and joyous mass of people.

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—those fountains of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market.

I'm not suggesting one deny negative emotions, but rather that you accept them and move through them by embracing the power we have to keep from wallowing in emotions that don't serve us well.

Accounting for what happened in our childhoods and why and who our parents are and how they succeeded and failed us is the work we all do when we do the work of becoming whole, grown-up people.

Each and every one of those people rose at a moment in their lives - one that is very much like this moment in your life, "suffocated" and at that moment they chose to tell the truth about themselves instead of staying "safe" inside the lie.

We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you've gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She'll offer you one of the balloons, but you won't take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You're wrong. You do.