Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Fighting Quotes, Letting Go Quotes

2. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

3. “My mom said there’s a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.”

— Cheryl Strayed

4. “Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Quotes About Heart

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

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Quotes About Ideas, Moving Forward Quotes

6. “How wild it was, to let it be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Kindness Quotes

9. “Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!”

— Cheryl Strayed

10. “I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

— Cheryl Strayed

11. “I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”

— Cheryl Strayed

12. “Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.”

— Cheryl Strayed

13. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

14. “Jump high and hard with intention and heart.”

— Cheryl Strayed

15. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Healing Quotes

16. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Real Quotes, Love You Quotes, Moving Quotes

17. “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

18. “But if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?”

— Cheryl Strayed

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.”

— Cheryl Strayed

22. “Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

23. “The only way out of a hole is to climb out.”

— Cheryl Strayed

24. “Acceptance is a small quiet room.”

— Cheryl Strayed

25. “Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”

— Cheryl Strayed

26. “I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.”

— Cheryl Strayed

27. “The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Risk-Taking Quotes

28. “You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don’t, it’s a living death. You’re just standing in one place dying.”

— Cheryl Strayed

29. “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

30. “But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.”

— Cheryl Strayed

31. “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

32. “What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”

— Cheryl Strayed

33. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

34. “Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness.”

— Cheryl Strayed

35. “So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word ‘love’ to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.”

— Cheryl Strayed

36. “Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.”

— Cheryl Strayed

37. “You get to define the terms of your life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

38. “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

39. “It’s a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.”

— Cheryl Strayed

40. “I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.”

— Cheryl Strayed

41. “The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.”

— Cheryl Strayed

42. “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

43. “We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Distance Quotes

44. “Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Featured in: Fun Quotes

45. “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

46. “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

47. “What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”

— Cheryl Strayed

48. “If there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.”

— Cheryl Strayed

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed