Top 380 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.”

— Cheryl Strayed

152. “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

153. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

154. “There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear that you’re not alone. Most of us have an invisible inner terrible someone who says all sorts of nutty stuff that has no basis in truth.”

— Cheryl Strayed

155. “The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

— Cheryl Strayed

156. “You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards.”

— Cheryl Strayed

157. “My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings. There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious decision to actually do it, and then the long third beginning, composed of weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother’s grave one last time.”

— Cheryl Strayed

158. “Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

159. “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

160. “We do not have the right to feel helpless. We must help ourselves. After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.”

— Cheryl Strayed

161. “I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.”

— Cheryl Strayed

162. “Run toward the darkness, sweet peas, and shine.”

— Cheryl Strayed

163. “A glorious something else awaits.”

— Cheryl Strayed

164. “I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it’s how I earned a living.”

— Cheryl Strayed

165. “You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.”

— Cheryl Strayed

166. “The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

168. “It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.”

— Cheryl Strayed

169. “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

170. “Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do what seems like the easiest thing to do – have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.”

— Cheryl Strayed

171. “Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.”

— Cheryl Strayed

172. “What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart.”

— Cheryl Strayed

173. “When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.”

— Cheryl Strayed

174. “Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light,” I.”

— Cheryl Strayed

175. “And every last one of us can do better than give up.”

— Cheryl Strayed

176. “I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn’t embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days – those very days in which I was naming myself – I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”

— Cheryl Strayed

177. “You can’t replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

178. “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

179. “I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book.”

— Cheryl Strayed

180. “There are stories you’ll learn if you’re strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

181. “Allow your acceptance of that to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.”

— Cheryl Strayed

182. “When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.”

— Cheryl Strayed

183. “Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.”

— Cheryl Strayed

184. “Eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself at the age of twenty will, over time, prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you’ll look back in twenty years and howl.”

— Cheryl Strayed

185. “Addiction is a tunnel that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Everything else happens out here in the light.”

— Cheryl Strayed

186. “It’s still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.”

— Cheryl Strayed

187. “Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.”

— Cheryl Strayed

188. “Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay.”

— Cheryl Strayed

189. “Romantic love is not a competitive sport.”

— Cheryl Strayed

190. “Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It’s huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It’s the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.”

— Cheryl Strayed

191. “It was the thing that had grown in me that I’d remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be. On.”

— Cheryl Strayed

192. “Will you do it later or will you do it now?”

— Cheryl Strayed

193. “Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people,” which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other people’s boyfriends.”

— Cheryl Strayed

194. “It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.”

— Cheryl Strayed

195. “Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.”

— Cheryl Strayed

196. “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

197. “Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

198. “And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time – it could be years from now – when you’ll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you’re going to hesitate. You’re going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you’re going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.”

— Cheryl Strayed

199. “The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more.”

— Cheryl Strayed

200. “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 waterr and to be able to pt my backpack down.”

— Cheryl Strayed