"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

"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