Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.”

— Cheryl Strayed

102. “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

103. “The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer – and yet also, like most things, so very simple – was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.”

— Cheryl Strayed

104. “Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

105. “If you had to give one piece of advice to people in their twenties, what would it be? To go to a bookstore and buy ten books of poetry and read them each five times. Why? Because the truth is inside.”

— Cheryl Strayed

106. “It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.”

— Cheryl Strayed

107. “Trust yourself. It’s Sugar’s golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”

— Cheryl Strayed

108. “Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.”

— Cheryl Strayed

109. “Go because you want to go. Because wanting to leave is enough.”

— Cheryl Strayed

110. “He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered.”

— Cheryl Strayed

111. “I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. 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

112. “Can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.”

— Cheryl Strayed

113. “Travel by foot. There is so much you can’t identify at top speed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

114. “We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.”

— Cheryl Strayed

115. “It was a world I’d never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I’d staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been.”

— Cheryl Strayed

116. “She was. She was imperfect. She made mistakes. But she was her best self more often than it’s reasonable for any human to be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

117. “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

118. “The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write – really that’s exactly what you need to write.”

— Cheryl Strayed

119. “My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up – and I’m that person for sure.”

— Cheryl Strayed

120. “That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

121. “It’s folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?”

— Cheryl Strayed

122. “You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t say this as a condemnation – I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too.”

— Cheryl Strayed

123. “Trust that all you’ve learned was worth learning, no matter what answer you have or do not have about what practical use it has in your life. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into the crazy beauty that awaits.”

— Cheryl Strayed

124. “Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. There are stories you’ll learn if you’re strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

125. “The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.”

— Cheryl Strayed

126. “My connection with him and his gloriously unfractured life only seemed to increase my pain. It wasn’t his fault. Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too. The only person I could bear to be with was the most unbearable person of all: my mother.”

— Cheryl Strayed

127. “I’m going to be mad at you for the rest of my life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

128. “Love many, trust few, and always paddle your own canoe.”

— Cheryl Strayed

129. “Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”

— Cheryl Strayed

130. “La paura genera paura. La forza genera forza.”

— Cheryl Strayed

131. “The Dream of a Common Language.”

— Cheryl Strayed

132. “The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty.”

— Cheryl Strayed

133. “There is always a sunrise and always a sunset. It’s up to you to be there for it, my mom said a million years ago, when she was alive. I rolled my eyes then, a million years ago. Now I live my life by it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

134. “I’m not suggesting one deny negative emotions, but rather that you accept them and move through them by embracing the power we have to keep from wallowing in emotions that don’t serve us well.”

— Cheryl Strayed

135. “What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.”

— Cheryl Strayed

136. “That was my father: the man who hadn’t fathered me. It amazed me every time. Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the way he should have had always been the wildest thing of all. But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

137. “My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

138. “Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.”

— Cheryl Strayed

139. “I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn’t help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.”

— Cheryl Strayed

140. “When the path reveals itself, follow it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

141. “Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself. Every last one of us can do better than give up.”

— Cheryl Strayed

142. “And so I walked on. It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a physical achievement far beyond anything I’d ever done. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and water and to be able to put my backpack down. I kept carrying my backpack anyway. Up and down and around the dry mountains.”

— Cheryl Strayed

143. “This is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow.”

— Cheryl Strayed

144. “Or just close your eyes and remember everything you already know. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.”

— Cheryl Strayed

145. “There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty.”

— Cheryl Strayed

146. “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. 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. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power.”

— Cheryl Strayed

147. “Men’s stories are seen as universal, women’s as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.”

— Cheryl Strayed

148. “Be the captain. You are the captain. Take the ball and run.”

— Cheryl Strayed

149. “Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.”

— Cheryl Strayed

150. “One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret. Small things that stung now: all the times I’d scorned her kindness by rolling my eyes or physically recoiled in response to her touch;.”

— Cheryl Strayed