Cheryl Strayed Quotes

I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it’s how I earned a living.

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.

My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.

The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.

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

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

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

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.

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.