Cheryl Strayed quotes - page 2

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true. (Cheryl Strayed)

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

Cheryl Strayed

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 to me.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

How wild it was, to let it be.

Cheryl Strayed

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

Cheryl Strayed

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

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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

Cheryl Strayed

I'm a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

...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.

Cheryl Strayed

Wanting to leave is enough.

Cheryl Strayed

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. (Cheryl Strayed)

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.

Cheryl Strayed

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Cheryl Strayed

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