Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”

— Cheryl Strayed

52. “I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”

— Cheryl Strayed

53. “The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.”

— Cheryl Strayed

54. “It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.”

— Cheryl Strayed

55. “The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it’s almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.”

— Cheryl Strayed

56. “Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it’s very hard work.”

— Cheryl Strayed

57. “You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.”

— Cheryl Strayed

58. “There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.”

— Cheryl Strayed

59. “I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn’t realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.”

— Cheryl Strayed

60. “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

61. “This is not “how your story ends”. It’s simply where it takes a turn you didn’t expect.”

— Cheryl Strayed

62. “The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”

— Cheryl Strayed

63. “Writing is hard for every last one of us – straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

— Cheryl Strayed

64. “I was trying to find a new home in the world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

65. “Be present for your own life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

66. “Hello, fear. Thank you for being here. You’re my indication that I’m doing what I need to do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

67. “Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.”

— Cheryl Strayed

68. “That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.”

— Cheryl Strayed

69. “Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I’m always interacting with people or with my computer or phone.”

— Cheryl Strayed

70. “Stop asking yourself what you want, what you desire, what interests you. Ask yourself instead: What has been given to me? Ask: What do I have to give back? Then give it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

71. “My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.”

— Cheryl Strayed

72. “You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”

— Cheryl Strayed

73. “He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

74. “I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”

— Cheryl Strayed

75. “We aren’t poor,” my mother said, again and again. “Because we’re rich in love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

76. “I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.”

— Cheryl Strayed

77. “Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

— Cheryl Strayed

78. “My mother’s death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I’ve grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don’t exist materially.”

— Cheryl Strayed

79. “I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

80. “I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.”

— Cheryl Strayed

81. “To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

82. “In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

— Cheryl Strayed

83. “I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.”

— Cheryl Strayed

84. “The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.”

— Cheryl Strayed

85. “One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it’s tedious and monotonous. You’re bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head.”

— Cheryl Strayed

86. “Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.”

— Cheryl Strayed

87. “You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.”

— Cheryl Strayed

88. “Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that’s the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.”

— Cheryl Strayed

89. “My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.”

— Cheryl Strayed

90. “What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I’d done some things I shouldn’t have? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything different from what I’d done? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if all those things I shouldn’t have done were what got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”

— Cheryl Strayed

91. “That’s how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.”

— Cheryl Strayed

92. “Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.”

— Cheryl Strayed

93. “I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It’s as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.”

— Cheryl Strayed

94. “The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.”

— Cheryl Strayed

95. “I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.”

— Cheryl Strayed

96. “Wanting to leave is enough.”

— Cheryl Strayed

97. “Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.”

— Cheryl Strayed

98. “Forgiveness doesn’t sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.”

— Cheryl Strayed

99. “There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you’re doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.”

— Cheryl Strayed

100. “There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let the man who doesn’t love you be one of them.”

— Cheryl Strayed