Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.

I never forgot you, even after all these years," she told me. "I'm so proud of you," I said, squeezing her shoulder. "I made it," she said. "Didn't I?" "You did," I said. "You absolutely did." I never forgot her either. Her name was Desiré.

Love would be two animals: a hummingbird and a snake. Both are perfectly untrainable.

I'd silently send my love to them across the universe in the way people have sent their silent love across the universe to the people they love throughout all time, and I would know in my heart that they had received it. I would be at peace.

What I meant when I said that Hillary Clinton had made the world ready for Hillary Clinton is that I recognized her as a woman who had whacked the weeds to blaze her own trail, who had always stood up again after she was told to sit down, who had persisted, and persisted, and persisted, nevertheless. What I meant is that a woman like this was finally going to win. Someday she will.

What you've got left after all the fools have departed are the old souls and the true hearts.

mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.

You can learn along the way.

Maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound, but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice.

There is a world of people out here who will love you for who you are. A whole, vibrant, fucked-up, happy, conflicted, joyous, and depressed mass of people who will say, You're gay? So the fuck what? We want you to be among us. That's the message of the It Gets Better Project. Hold on, it says, and stick it out, because guess what? It gets better.

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.

Every life, Tranströmer writes, "has a sister ship," one that follows "quite another route" than the one we ended up taking.

It's really condescending to tell you how young you are. It's even inaccurate. Some of you who are graduating from college are not young. Some of you are older than me. But to those of you new college graduates who are indeed young, the old new college graduates will back me up on this: you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.

I 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. We are complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.

I wasn't with my mom when she died. No one was. She died alone in a hospital room, and for so many years it felt like three-quarters of my insides were frozen solid because of that.

This is to be expected. It is as it should be. 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

Of himself Grant said, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.

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.

You know how alchoholics who go to AA are always using that phrase "one day at a time"? They say that because to say "I will never drink again" is just too damn much. It's big an hard and bound to fail.

True intimacy isn't a psychodrama. It isn't the "highest highs and lowest lows". It's communion and mellow compatibility. It's friendship and mutual respect.

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.

I still can't entirely explain why I needed to leave my ex. I was tortured by this very question for years because I felt like such an ass for breaking his heart and I was so shattered I'd broken my own. I was too young to commit myself to one person. We weren't as compatible as we initially seemed.

Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.

There's a saying about drug addicts that they stop maturing emotionally at the age they start using, and I've known enough addicts to believe this to be true enough. I think the same thing can happen in longtime monogamy. Perhaps some of your limited interpretations about what it means to say the word "love" are left over from what you thought it meant all those years ago...