Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life.

Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.

That place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. It's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.

Sometimes the thing you fear the most in your relationship turns out to be the thing that brings you and your partner to a deeper place of understanding and intimacy.

There are so many things to be tortured about. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let someone who doesn't love you be one of them.

Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret.

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.

You are obliged to tell the people you're sleeping with whether or not you're sleeping with them exclusively. There are no exceptions to this rule. Ever. For anyone. Under any circumstances. People have the right to know if the people they are fucking are also fucking other people. This is the only way the people fucking people who are fucking other people can make emotionally healthy decisions about their lives.

She was. She was imperfect. She made mistakes. But she was her best self more often than it's reasonable for any human to be.

Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you've got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.

Don't worry about it too much. You're green, but you're tough. And tough is what matters the most out here. Not just anyone could do what you're doing.

Stop worrying about whether you're fat. You're not fat. Or rather, you're sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69)

We don't reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.

But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I 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.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.

He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

But love doesn't make a mean drunk not a mean drunk or a narcissist not a narcissist or a jackass not a jackass.

A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone.

The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.