"Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Cheryl Strayed quotes (page 8 of 10)
198 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered."
Read quote
3 likes
"Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was."
Read quote
3 likes
"I've learned so much as both a writer and a human."
Read quote
3 likes
"My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love."
Read quote
3 likes
"But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got."
Read quote
3 likes
"I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake."
Read quote
3 likes
"It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are savages insides. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn't a person reading this who hasn't at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else."
Read quote
3 likes
"The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve."
Read quote
3 likes
"I remember being absolutely rocked to my core by how profoundly I could love another human being."
Read quote
3 likes
"When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes."
Read quote
3 likes
"One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it's tedious and monotonous. You're bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head."
Read quote
3 likes
"In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole."
Read quote
3 likes
"Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet."
Read quote
3 likes
"I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one."
Read quote
3 likes
"And if you're gonna be a writer, you just truly have to be a writer. You have to throw yourself into it and deal with the negative consequences of that. And there are negative consequences. I mean, there are. But, it's also true that you wouldn't be interviewing me right now if I had worked at the post office. You wouldn't. I would be still writing, but I wouldn't have gotten as far as I've gotten, because I wouldn't have had the time."
Read quote
3 likes
"…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had."
Read quote
3 likes
"The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there."
Read quote
3 likes
"Wanting to leave is enough."
Read quote
3 likes