"I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go."
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Quote collection
Cheryl Strayed quotes (page 4 of 10)
198 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all."
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"Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I'm always interacting with people or with my computer or phone."
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"I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn't realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex."
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"On my hike my brain was left to wander. That was often maddening because it was tedious and monotonous sometimes, but then my the mind would take over, and that's when I'd start hearing the music in my head or thinking deeply about people I know or things that I didn't even know I remembered anymore. Those thoughts would be there. I wouldn't have had them otherwise."
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"With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand."
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"There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart."
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"Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place."
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"He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life."
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"You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness."
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"Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves."
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"And every last one of us can do better than give up."
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"The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself."
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"There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course."
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"Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night."
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"People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love."
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"But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?"
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"Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here."
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"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 of the ones you’re holding and my dear one, you and I have been granted a mighty generous one."
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""The Dream of a Common Language" by Adrienne Rich. I carried it the entire hike. On my first night, when I felt like I was in too deep, I read the first poem out loud to myself over and over."
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