Cheryl Strayed

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.

— Cheryl Strayed

“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life.…

— Cheryl Strayed

“He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know…

— Cheryl Strayed

“Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you…

— Cheryl Strayed

I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at…

— Cheryl Strayed

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family…

— Cheryl Strayed

“It is, I guess, exactly what you’re stuck with if you can’t get some perspective on this matter, sweet pea.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer…

— Cheryl Strayed

“There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your…

— Cheryl Strayed

Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very…

— Cheryl Strayed

“You can’t take a class if taking a class feels like it’s going to kill you. Faking it never works. If you…

— Cheryl Strayed

“I watched it bounce - it was lightning fast and in slow motion all at once - and then I watched it…

— Cheryl Strayed

It's funny, it never occurred to me that a movie star would play me. But now that she [Reese Witherspoon] is playing…

— Cheryl Strayed

“As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull…

— Cheryl Strayed

“And it was true. I always would have guessed it, even all the time that I feared it would never happen. Being…

— Cheryl Strayed

“Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as…

— Cheryl Strayed

“For once I didn’t ache for a companion. For once the phrase a woman with a hole in her heart didn’t thunder…

— Cheryl Strayed

“It’s the threadbare cape you’ve wrapped around yourself composed of self-pitying half truth. And it absolutely will not serve you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“If love were an animal, what species would it be and could you train it? Love would be two animals: a hummingbird…

— Cheryl Strayed

The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's…

— Cheryl Strayed

“Sometimes the thing you fear the most in your relationship turns out to be the thing that brings you and your partner…

— Cheryl Strayed

“Each of Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the…

— Cheryl Strayed

"The Dream of a Common Language" by Adrienne Rich. I carried it the entire hike. On my first night, when I felt…

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

“I’m going to address you bluntly, but it’s a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“They opened my mind to realities I didn’t know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little…

— Cheryl Strayed

“I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of…

— Cheryl Strayed

“You dont have the right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the…

— Cheryl Strayed

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

— Cheryl Strayed

“It will never be okay,” a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. “It…

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

“You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and…

— Cheryl Strayed

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to…

— Cheryl Strayed

“I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and…

— Cheryl Strayed

“Why? Because in your twenties you’re becoming who you’re going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.

— Cheryl Strayed

“Humans are beautifully imperfect and complex. We’re horny, ass-saving, ego-driven drug fiends, among other, more noble things.”

— Cheryl Strayed

“If you had to give one piece of advice to people in their twenties, what would it be? To go to a…

— Cheryl Strayed

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You…

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed