103 Inspiring Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up -- and I'm that person for sure.

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 makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.

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.

Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.

I've learned so much as both a writer and a human.

Grief is tremendous, but love is bigger. You are grieving because you loved truly.

How wild it was, to let it be.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again.

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.

If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don't own other people's crap.

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.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us.

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely...and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, "Tenth of December." He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.

Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn't think I could do that.

It was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls enchanting the city.

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.

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.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely…and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.
But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.

I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body to the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn't a day on the trail when that monotony didn't ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure.

At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.

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.

What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.

We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.

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 it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. 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.

So much of what I've learned, so much of what's good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them?
THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.

Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it.

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.

I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please.

What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

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.

But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

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 big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.

Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.

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.

I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full...I didn't feel like a big fate idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work.

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother -- even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and or creative writing degree you'll say: 'Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire;' or maybe just: 'Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.'
And then smile very serenely until they say, 'Oh.

My mom died when I was 22. My stepfather, who I loved like a father, pretty quickly got involved with another woman. Suddenly there was another woman sleeping in my mother's bed, and it was very difficult. Their relationship brought up my profound loss, and the truth was that my family would never be the same again.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there.It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life," she'd wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. "I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me." "Oh, Mom," was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else.

When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.

Acceptance is a small quiet room.

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 liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.

"I've given you everything," she insisted again and again in her last days.
"Yes, " I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She did. She's come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

It was my life -- like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.

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.

I think being a woman alone enhanced the impulse in others to be generous. What we're told is that to be a woman alone is to be in a dangerous situation. The message is that people are gong to prey on you and do bad things to you. That may be true in some cases, but what I experienced was the other case.

I actually don't have any fear of people reading Wild and going out unprepared. Because one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I went out unprepared. And when you really think about it, all I did wrong was that I took too much stuff, which is the most common backpacker mistake. The part that I wasn't prepared for is the part you can't prepare for.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.

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.

Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

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.

Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.

I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I'd often disputed. But it turned out that it didn't matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.

Reading's my reward at the end of the day.

If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.

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.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life -- like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be.

The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

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.

The people who don't give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

The only way I've been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That's where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world.

Of course some people manage to write books really young and publish really young. But for most writers, it takes several years because you have to apprentice yourself to the craft, and you also have to grow up. I think maturity is connected to one's ability to write well.

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.

The only way out of a hole is to climb out.

All of us, as we mature and grow up -- if we're doing life right -- we evolve.

I believe our early experiences and beliefs about our place in the world inform who we think we are and what we deserve and by what means it should be given to us.

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.