Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “The air came alive with the sound of the wind whipping the trees at times and at other times it was profoundly hushed by the endless silencing snow. Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.”

— Cheryl Strayed

452. “They opened my mind to realities I didn’t know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much.”

— Cheryl Strayed

453. “I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

454. “My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale. It’s so simple it breaks my heart. How unspecial that fact is to so many, how ordinary for a child to wear a dress her grandmother bought her, but how very extraordinary it was to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

455. “We talk about our friends behind their backs. We do. Ask any social scientist who has studies human communication behaviors. Even you edmitted to doing this. Our friends are witnese to our attributes and flaws, our bad habits and good qualities, our contradictions and our contrivances. That they need to occasionally discuss the negative aspects or our lives and personalities in terms less than admiring is to be expected.”

— Cheryl Strayed

456. “I looked north, in its direction – the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I’d been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.”

— Cheryl Strayed

457. “Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.”

— Cheryl Strayed

458. “No’ is golden. ‘No’ is the kind of power the good witch wields. It’s the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.”

— Cheryl Strayed

459. “Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. 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

460. “Perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant that I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

461. “Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice.”

— Cheryl Strayed

462. “Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you truly so cowed by adversity?”

— Cheryl Strayed

463. “Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.”

— Cheryl Strayed

464. “My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn’t. We were no longer married, and as I settled alongside the Three Young Bucks into the bed I used to share with Paul, I felt a kind of acceptance of that, a kind of clarity where there’d been so much uncertainty.”

— Cheryl Strayed

465. “I’d reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn’t have. I.”

— Cheryl Strayed

466. “She loved horses and Hank Williams and had a best friend named Babs.”

— Cheryl Strayed

467. “Or rather, it’s a bunch of what happened that ends up being about nothing at all.”

— Cheryl Strayed

468. “Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL.”

— Cheryl Strayed

469. “But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.”

— Cheryl Strayed

470. “He was the first person I’d met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn’t need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.”

— Cheryl Strayed

471. “I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

472. “It’s really condescending to tell you how young you are. It’s even inaccurate. Some of you who are graduating from college are not young. Some of you are older than me. But to those of you new college graduates who are indeed young, the old new college graduates will back me up on this: you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.”

— Cheryl Strayed

473. “Even if you get the dream, you don’t know if it will stay true.”

— Cheryl Strayed

474. “I hope you can do that someday with someone else,” I said when he didn’t reply, though the very thought of that someone else pierced my heart. “I hope you can too,” he said. I sat in the darkness beside him, wanting to believe that I was capable of finding the kind of love I had with him again, only without wrecking it the next time around. It felt impossible to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

475. “A proclamation of love is not inherently “loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.”

— Cheryl Strayed

476. “Your behavior and words will deeply impact your child’s life – both how he or she feels about his or her father and also how he or she feels about him or herself.”

— Cheryl Strayed

477. “She’d kept the secret sealed so tightly inside her for so long it could not be extracted without altering who she was, she realized now. The secret was not separate from her. In the telling of it, she’d come undone.”

— Cheryl Strayed

478. “I know I’m being a bit glib about it, but only because if I look at it stone cold serious it smashes my heart into smithereens.”

— Cheryl Strayed

479. “I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she’d been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought.”

— Cheryl Strayed

480. “In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large:.”

— Cheryl Strayed

481. “They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can’t buy.”

— Cheryl Strayed

482. “Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.”

— Cheryl Strayed

483. “As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn’t put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

484. “Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

485. “All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.”

— Cheryl Strayed

486. “My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn’t.”

— Cheryl Strayed

487. “La solitudine era sempre stata un luogo reale per me, come se fosse una stanza dove potevo rifugiarmi per essere davvero me stessa.”

— Cheryl Strayed

488. “Maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound, but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice.”

— Cheryl Strayed

489. “The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

490. “Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.”

— Cheryl Strayed

491. “I came up with another reason to bolster my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea.”

— Cheryl Strayed

492. “I felt better than I’d ever felt in all of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel.”

— Cheryl Strayed

493. “Of himself Grant said, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”

— Cheryl Strayed

494. “As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to a credit card that someone else is paying off.”

— Cheryl Strayed

495. “We need books, and Cheryl’s books in particular, because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love. Radical.”

— Cheryl Strayed

496. “I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady’s strong back, finally leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make.”

— Cheryl Strayed

497. “I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I’d told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

498. “That was my prayer: Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem.”

— Cheryl Strayed

499. “I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

500. “He hadn’t loved.”

— Cheryl Strayed