Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

467. “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

468. “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

469. “He hadn’t loved.”

— Cheryl Strayed

470. “What are your spiritual beliefs? I do not believe in God as most people conceive of God, but I believe there is a divine spirit in each of us. 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

471. “The answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right-wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we’re angry or scared or in pain. We are a complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.”

— Cheryl Strayed

472. “You say your marriage is “loveless” and perhaps you’re correct that your relationship has come to its natural end, but I’d like you to consider the notion that you aren’t the best judge of that right now. You’re a psychologically distressed drug addict with four kids, no health insurance, uncertain business prospects, and a pile of bills. I wouldn’t expect your marriage to be thriving. I doubt you’ve been.”

— Cheryl Strayed

473. “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

474. “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

475. “Of this I am absolutely sure: Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth. I know too many people who didn’t do those things. They all end up mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

476. “I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence.”

— Cheryl Strayed

477. “As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this – the hardest thing I’d ever done. I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”

— Cheryl Strayed

478. “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

479. “Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.”

— Cheryl Strayed

480. “An REI worker had encouraged me to buy a box of Spenco 2nd Skin – gel patches meant to treat burns that also happened to be great for blisters.”

— Cheryl Strayed

481. “In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it’s a memoir with an agenda. 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

482. “Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. It’s the man who opts not to invite his abusive mother to.”

— Cheryl Strayed

483. “I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn’t let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead.”

— Cheryl Strayed

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

488. “Divorcing him is the most excruciating decision I’ve ever made. But it was the wisest one too. And I wasn’t the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn’t have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear. To leave him was a kindness of a sort, though it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

— Cheryl Strayed

489. “I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn.”

— Cheryl Strayed

490. “What’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear? We don’t know – as a culture, as a gender, as individuals, you and I. The fact that we don’t know is feminism’s one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans.”

— Cheryl Strayed

491. “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

492. “She cried and her tears fell in the wrong direction. Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed. She.”

— Cheryl Strayed

493. “I never believed the boys were angry. I believed they were hurt and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow. It was the channel down which their impotent male rivers could rage.”

— Cheryl Strayed

494. “It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild.”

— Cheryl Strayed

495. “I’m sorry,” she said and reached over and squeezed his leg. She couldn’t help but think that she’d ruined his life. It didn’t yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.”

— Cheryl Strayed

496. “We act as if we don’t know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that’s changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.”

— Cheryl Strayed

497. “You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to.”

— Cheryl Strayed

498. “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

499. “Yes, I’d been a loving daughter and yes, I’d been there for her when it mattered, but I could have been better. I could have been what I’d begged her to say I was: the best daughter in the world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

500. “It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.”

— Cheryl Strayed