Cheryl Strayed Quotes

...but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.

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

Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and loaded with promises and commitments that we may or may not want or keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.

"I know it's hard to write, darling. But it's harder not to. The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do."

"The void?" I'd asked, crestfallen.
"it's a good thing," she said. "It's the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it into something that's new and alive."

I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

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.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? MARY OLIVER, “The Summer Day

Be fearless enough to let love transform you.

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away.

I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.

What if you allowed your God to exist in he simple words of compassion others offer you? ... What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through our window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering more than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

"We aren't poor," my mother said, again and again. "Because we're rich in love."

I have breathed my way through so many people I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn't change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes I've breathed in gratitude and out forgiveness. Sometimes I haven't been able to muster anything beyond the breath itself, my mind forced blank with nothing but the desire to be free of sorrow and rage.

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id 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.