Cheryl Strayed Quotes

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

That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you've got. You have to find people who love you truly and love you back with the same truth. But that's all.

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself. Every last one of us can do better than give up.

When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, “Samurai Song” Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL

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

I love having boyfriends. A girl can wait for the right man to come along – but in the meantime that doesn’t mean she can’t have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones.

all the things I’d done in my life, of all the versions of myself I’d lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.

Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way as lack of it does.

"The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you."

we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. 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.

It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me. I couldn’t even hate her properly. I didn’t get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I wished she’d done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.