Cheryl Strayed

"Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life."

- Cheryl Strayed

"It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way."

- Cheryl Strayed

"But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Compassion is about giving all the love that you’ve got."

- 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

"We have to be whole people to find whole love"

- 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

"When we look in the mirror, we see not only our external appearance but also the journey that has shaped us."

- Cheryl Strayed

"The mirror reveals our unique journey, reminding us of the experiences that shaped us into who we are."

- Cheryl Strayed

"We have to be whole people to find whole love."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding."

- Cheryl Strayed

"I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Nobody ever gets over losses like that. It's just part of your broken heart forever."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal."

- 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."

- 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

"There's always a sunrise and always a sunset and it's up to you to choose to be there for it."

- Cheryl Strayed

"There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it… put yourself in the way of beauty."

- Cheryl Strayed

"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."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room."

- Cheryl Strayed

"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."

- Cheryl Strayed

"You let time pass. That’s the cure. You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day, you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun, and you close your eyes, lean your head back and realize you’re okay."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room."

- 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

"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."

- Cheryl Strayed

"How wild it was, to let it be."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig."

- Cheryl Strayed

"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. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it."

- Cheryl Strayed

"You gotta find your best self and when you do, you gotta hold on to it for dear life."

- Cheryl Strayed

"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."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore."

- Cheryl Strayed

"Bravery is acknowledging your fear and doing it anyway."

- Cheryl Strayed

"It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild... sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental."

- Cheryl Strayed

"There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty."

- Cheryl Strayed