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.

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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"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

Awareness

"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

Awareness

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

- Cheryl Strayed

Compassion

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

- Cheryl Strayed

Compassion

"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

Self-awareness

More Courage Quotes

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"The greatest strength lies in vulnerability."

- Beauty and the Beast

Courage

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."

- Mark Twain

Courage

"I am learning every day to allow the space between where I am and where I want to be to inspire me and not terrify me."

- Tracee Ellis Ross

Courage

"If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough."

- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Courage

"Courage, dear heart."

- C.S. Lewis

Courage