Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

Because no matter how experimental he is, his life isn't an experiment.

For some of you, those things have already happened.

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.

Even if you get the dream, you don't know if it will stay true.

There's a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you'll be comforted to hear that you're not alone.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life.

Most of their stories were, like Geraldine's, more mundane— young love for which they alone had paid the price.

She'd kept the secret sealed so tightly inside her for so long it could not be extracted without altering who she was, she realized now. The secret was not separate from her. In the telling of it, she'd come undone.

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

you must set boundaries. Fucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.

You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

She couldn't help but think that she'd ruined his life. It didn't yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.

Change is one person doing one thing different one time.

Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!

Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don't, it's a living death. You're just standing in one place dying.

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.