Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

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.

the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

Transformation doesn't ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that's already inside of you. You only have to bloom.

It's folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?

At a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us.

I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe.

What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I'd done some things I shouldn't have? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything different from what I'd done? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if all those things I shouldn't have done were what got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was about to happen. But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I'd realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really -- all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.

To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.

What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah?

And if there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out.

Transformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

Run toward the darkness, sweet peas, and shine.

the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.

I prayed to the whole wide universe and hoped that God would be in it, listening to me. I prayed and prayed, and then I faltered. Not because I couldn't find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother's life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch.

Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.

This is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You've earned the right to grow.

There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people of the planet know: that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.