Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

469. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

472. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

474. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

476. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

484. “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

485. “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

486. “I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.”

— Cheryl Strayed

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

491. “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

492. “The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center.”

— Cheryl Strayed

493. “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

494. “I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.”

— Cheryl Strayed

495. “That mystery is not the curse of our existence; it’s the wonder. It’s what people are talking about when they talk about the circle of life that we’re all part of whether we sign up to be or not – the living, the dead, those being born right this moment, and the others who are fading out.”

— Cheryl Strayed

496. “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

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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

500. “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