Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.”

— Cheryl Strayed

452. “You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.”

— Cheryl Strayed

453. “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

454. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

456. “He said, “Don’t get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

457. “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.”

— Cheryl Strayed

458. “It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we’re brave enough to touch the rawest, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without pause and see – thrillingly, terrifyingly – that it was never her we had to fear. It was always only us.”

— Cheryl Strayed

459. “Testing yourself means relinquishing the things you believe have so far kept you safe or comfortable.”

— Cheryl Strayed

460. “The thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.”

— Cheryl Strayed

461. “What this requires of us is that we don’t get tangled up in the living, even when we in fact feel woefully tangled up. It demands that we focus not only on what’s happening in our stories, but also what our stories are about.”

— Cheryl Strayed

462. “These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

463. “Humans are beautifully imperfect and complex. We’re horny, ass-saving, ego-driven drug fiends, among other, more noble things.”

— Cheryl Strayed

464. “The question isn’t whether you should stay or go. The question is: How would your life be transformed if you chose to love this time with all your intelligence?”

— Cheryl Strayed

465. “You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear.”

— Cheryl Strayed

466. “You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success.”

— Cheryl Strayed

467. “We didn’t exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.”

— Cheryl Strayed

468. “The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

469. “He taught you how to love like you’ve never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you’ve never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.”

— Cheryl Strayed

470. “I got you,” my friend the writer and teacher Jen Pastiloff says so often she has it tattooed on her arm. That’s what this vespers thing felt like to me, Spent. Like someone had me. Like for the tiniest glimmer of a moment I was held by a force more powerful than the force I could muster on my own.”

— Cheryl Strayed

471. “I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I’d thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.”

— Cheryl Strayed

472. “You’re here. So be here, dear one. You’re okay with us for now.”

— Cheryl Strayed

473. “I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing.”

— Cheryl Strayed

474. “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

475. “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

476. “The truest story is always the widest one. It’s the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.”

— Cheryl Strayed

477. “We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, where we say we love them or not.”

— Cheryl Strayed

478. “I think you need new boots,” he said when I showed him my feet, echoing Greg’s and Brent’s sentiments. “But I can’t get new boots. I don’t have the money,” I told him, no longer too ashamed to admit it. “Where’d you buy them?” asked Rex. “REI.” “Call them. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. They’ll replace them for free.” “They will?” “Call the 1-800 number,” he said. I.”

— Cheryl Strayed

479. “But transformation often demands that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds. Your rational mind knows that men leave their wives for younger women all the time. Your emotional response is you can’t believe your father did. Your rational mind knows that it’s hard for even strong, ethical people to sustain a long-term monogamy. Your emotional response is you’re shocked your own parents failed to do so.”

— Cheryl Strayed

480. “But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.”

— Cheryl Strayed

481. “Where was my mother? I wondered. I’d carried her so long, staggering beneath her weight. On the other side of the river, I let myself think. And something inside of me released.”

— Cheryl Strayed

482. “It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

483. “It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

484. “We are all savages inside. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

485. “There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay.”

— Cheryl Strayed

486. “I’ve long believed literature’s greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone.”

— Cheryl Strayed

487. “With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.”

— Cheryl Strayed

488. “I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.”

— Cheryl Strayed

489. “The sketches of your real life and your sister life are right there before you and you get to decide what to do. One is the life you’ll have; the other is the one you won’t. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won’t let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?”

— Cheryl Strayed

490. “I can’t say when you’ll get love or how you’ll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it’s never too much to ask for it and that it’s not crazy to fear you’ll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It’s the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It’s worthy of all the hullabaloo.”

— Cheryl Strayed

491. “That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own, personal “educational opportunities.” They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth.”

— Cheryl Strayed

492. “True intimacy isn’t a psychodrama. It isn’t the “highest highs and lowest lows”. It’s communion and mellow compatibility. It’s friendship and mutual respect.”

— Cheryl Strayed

493. “No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

494. “In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind.”

— Cheryl Strayed

495. “One thing I never forgot from my Latin class is that a language that is descended from another language is called a daughter language. It was the beginning of the next era of my life, like this is of yours.”

— Cheryl Strayed

496. “The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle.”

— Cheryl Strayed

497. “The question about who you will love and when you will love him is out of your hands. It’s a mystery that you can’t solve.”

— Cheryl Strayed

498. “We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.”

— Cheryl Strayed

499. “I’ve long believed literature’s greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.”

— Cheryl Strayed

500. “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