Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Addiction is a tunnel that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Everything else happens out here in the light.”

— Cheryl Strayed

202. “I’d made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

204. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

211. “To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. 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

212. “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

213. “I had arrived. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself though I didn’t know the meaning of it just yet.”

— Cheryl Strayed

214. “I looked up at the blue sky, feeling, in fact, a burst of energy, but mostly feeling my mother’s presence, remembering why it was that I’d thought I could hike this trail.”

— Cheryl Strayed

215. “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

216. “Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time.”

— Cheryl Strayed

217. “The bull, I acknowledged grimly, could be in either direction, since I hadn’t seen where he’d run once I closed my eyes. I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward.”

— Cheryl Strayed

218. “Of all the things that convinced me that I should not be afraid while on this journey, of all the things I’d made myself believe so I could hike the PCT, the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”

— Cheryl Strayed

219. “I have breathed my way through so many people I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn’t change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes I’ve breathed in gratitude and out forgiveness. Sometimes I haven’t been able to muster anything beyond the breath itself, my mind forced blank with nothing but the desire to be free of sorrow and rage.”

— Cheryl Strayed

220. “One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret.”

— Cheryl Strayed

221. “Withholding distorts reality.”

— Cheryl Strayed

222. “Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. 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

223. “Each and every one of them had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you’ll crucify me for it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

224. “I didn’t exactly want to get divorced. I didn’t exactly not want to. I believed in almost equal measure both that divorcing Paul was the right thing to do and that by doing so I was destroying the best thing I had. By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I’d never been.”

— Cheryl Strayed

225. “You cannot convince people to love you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

226. “At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

227. “I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.”

— Cheryl Strayed

228. “But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.”

— Cheryl Strayed

229. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

230. “But I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I’d come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really – all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.”

— Cheryl Strayed

231. “I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again.”

— Cheryl Strayed

232. “We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright – to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.”

— Cheryl Strayed

233. “Thinking deeply about your choices and actions from the stance of your future self can serve as both a motivational and a corrective force.”

— Cheryl Strayed

234. “The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it’s especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

235. “Most of the people I met on the PCT passed only briefly through my life, but I was enriched by each of them. They made me laugh they made me think, they made me go on another day, and most of all, they made me trust entirely in the kindness of strangers.”

— Cheryl Strayed

236. “His life is like your life and my life and all the lives of all the people who are reading these words right now. It’s a roiling stew of fear and need and desire and love and the hunger to be loved. And mostly, it’s the latter.”

— Cheryl Strayed

237. “I was a terrible believer in things, I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was just as searching as I was skeptical.”

— Cheryl Strayed

238. “And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out.”

— Cheryl Strayed

239. “I slept on my tarp, not wanting to shelter myself on that last night, and woke before dawn to watch the sun rise over Mount Hood. It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that. I sat for a long while, letting the light fill the sky, letting it expand and reach down into the trees. I closed my eyes and listened hard to Eagle Creek. It was running to the Columbia River, like me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

240. “The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are.”

— Cheryl Strayed

241. “Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.”

— Cheryl Strayed

242. “It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden.”

— Cheryl Strayed

243. “I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother away. Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.”

— Cheryl Strayed

244. “It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn’t have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

245. “In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large: the color of a desert flower that brushed against me on the trail or the grand sweep of the sky as the sun faded over the mountains.”

— Cheryl Strayed

246. “Be fearless enough to let love transform you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

247. “I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body to the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure.”

— Cheryl Strayed

248. “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

— Cheryl Strayed

249. “It only had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”

— Cheryl Strayed

250. “What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?”

— Cheryl Strayed