Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

152. “Walk without a stick into the darkest woods. Believe that the fairy tale is true.”

— Cheryl Strayed

153. “And so I walked on.”

— Cheryl Strayed

154. “My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.”

— Cheryl Strayed

155. “Transformation doesn’t ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that’s already inside of you. You only have to bloom.”

— Cheryl Strayed

156. “The body knows. When your heart sinks. When you feel sick to your gut. When something blossoms in your chest. When your brain gloriously pops. That’s your body telling you the One True Thing. Listen to it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

157. “He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he’d become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.”

— Cheryl Strayed

158. “People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there’s no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

159. “Nobody’s going to do your life for you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

161. “I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “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

162. “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

163. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

164. “What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an orphan forevermore, and I could take no mercy on it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

165. “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

166. “The truth was, in spite of all that, she’d been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who – no matter how long they lived – would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

167. “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

168. “So on one hand, because the wilderness was familiar to me, it really helped me be brave. But it still was scary sometimes. I had to say to myself: “Chances are, you’re not going to be mauled by a bear.””

— Cheryl Strayed

169. “Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.”

— Cheryl Strayed

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

180. “A glorious something else awaits.”

— 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. “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

183. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

185. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

193. “Our most meaningful relationships are often those that continued beyond the juncture at which they came closest to ending.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

195. “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

196. “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

197. “The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich; Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout; My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir; The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin; The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader by Rees Hughes and Corey Lewis; Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls; A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

199. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed