Cheryl Strayed Quotes

137 quotes in 2076 categories

• Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.
• The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading…
• You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out…
• I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
• I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.
• It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How…
• The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.
• Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.
• Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to doI don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done…
• What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a…
• A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really…
• The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
• What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I…
• Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking…
• I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything…
• I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but…
• Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
• And every last one of us can do better than give up.
• Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost
• Going down (descending), I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yard on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling…

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