“We aren't poor," my mother said, again and again. "Because we're rich in love.” — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn’t begrudge my mother a thing. The truth was, in spite of… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her. My whole life sort of ended… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“was six,” I said. “The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks.… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“It will never be okay,” a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. “It… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her. — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“I can’t tell you what to do. No one can. But as the mother of two children, I can tell you what… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life," she'd wept to me once, in the days after… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“All this is probably for nothing,' she [her mother] said once we'd hatched the plan. 'Most likely I'll flunk out anyway.' To… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love,… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
My family didn't go to church. Once when I slept over at the house of a friend, her parents brought me to… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
My mom died when I was 22. My stepfather, who I loved like a father, pretty quickly got involved with another woman.… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
When someone you love truly dies, you have to find them over and over again in the world, and I think you… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“When it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair. If we rise, they will rise with us… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard.” — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“. . . there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
“I never believed the boys were angry. I believed they were hurt and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow. It was the… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
