Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years,… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes,… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness. — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can. — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can… — 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
No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
A lot of artists give up because it's just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good,… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10… — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. — Cheryl Strayed Copy Share Image
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire… — 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
