Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2024 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. “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

453. “Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.”

— Cheryl Strayed

454. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

456. “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

457. “I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The.”

— Cheryl Strayed

458. “There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear that you’re not alone.”

— Cheryl Strayed

459. “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

460. “No is golden. No is the kind of power the good witch wields.”

— Cheryl Strayed

461. “It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted – and yet it was impossible to do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

462. “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

463. “And it was true. I always would have guessed it, even all the time that I feared it would never happen. Being there that night was the meaning of my life. Getting there had been my every intention. When I say you don’t have to explain what you’re going to do with your life, I’m not suggesting you lounge around whining about how difficult it is. I’m suggesting you apply yourself in directions for which we have no accurate measurement. I’m talking about work. And love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

464. “I made a crumpled gesture with my hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.”

— Cheryl Strayed

465. “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

466. “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

467. “It was all unknown to me then... everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true... 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

468. “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

469. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

471. “I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself – as I did every damn time – the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always.”

— Cheryl Strayed

472. “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

473. “I learned then what I have learned in many other ways over the course of my life: that when we’re in the presence of someone else’s pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it’s a small thing. Like writing a letter.”

— Cheryl Strayed

474. “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

475. “When you feel terrible because someone has gotten something you want, you force yourself to remember how very much you have been given. You remember that there is plenty for all of us. You remember that someone else’s success has absolutely no bearing on your own.”

— Cheryl Strayed

476. “My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.”

— Cheryl Strayed

477. “It’s a useful way to see what’s there. A lot of times, it isn’t much.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

479. “I still can’t entirely explain why I needed to leave my ex. I was tortured by this very question for years because I felt like such an ass for breaking his heart and I was so shattered I’d broken my own. I was too young to commit myself to one person. We weren’t as compatible as we initially seemed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

480. “Every now and then I could see myself – truly see myself – and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was “the woman with the hole in her heart.” That was me. That was why I’d longed for a companion the night before. That was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking alone for three months on the PCT.”

— Cheryl Strayed

481. “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

482. “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

483. “Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

485. “I’d silently send my love to them across the universe in the way people have sent their silent love across the universe to the people they love throughout all time, and I would know in my heart that they had received it. I would be at peace.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

487. “I hated him and I loved him. With him I felt trapped, branded, held, and beloved. Like a daughter.”

— Cheryl Strayed

488. “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

489. “It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

490. “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

491. “Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get to be junk.”

— Cheryl Strayed

492. “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

493. “That we must help ourselves. That after destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.”

— Cheryl Strayed

494. “We are here to build the house. It’s our work, our job, the most important gig of all: to make a place that belongs to us, a structure composed of our own moral code. Not the code that only echoes imposed cultural values, but the one that tells us on a visceral level what to do. You know what’s right for you and what’s wrong for you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

495. “It will never be okay,” a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. “It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.”

— Cheryl Strayed

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “I suggest you forget about forgiveness for now and strive for acceptance instead.”

— Cheryl Strayed

500. “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