Quotes from Cheryl Strayed

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large: the color of a desert flower that brushed against me on the trail or the grand sweep of the sky as the sun faded over the mountains.

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there's arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.

most importantly love like its the only thing you know how at the end of the day all this means nothing this page where you're sitting your degree your job the money nothing even matters except love and human connection who you loved and how deeply you loved them how you touched the people around you and how much you gave them

Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs.

I knew that if I allowed fear to over take me, my journey was doomed.

It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.

Allow your acceptance of that to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don't have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.

As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true.

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.

within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.

I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world

I looked up at the blue sky, feeling, in fact, a burst of energy, but mostly feeling my mother's presence, remembering why it was that I'd thought I could hike this trail.

He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again.

Don't stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don't fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight.

I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbelieer in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.

I didn't know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.

You can't squeeze blood from a turnip.

Be the captain. You are the captain. Take the ball and run.

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