Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.”

— Cheryl Strayed

253. “You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

254. “When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.”

— Cheryl Strayed

255. “Women are the ones with the cojones,” said Paco as he made a bowl of guacamole. “We guys like to think we’re the ones, but we’re wrong.”

— Cheryl Strayed

256. “Resentful of her own repressive Catholic upbringing, she’d avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was dying and I didn’t even have God.”

— Cheryl Strayed

257. “Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you’d just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. 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

258. “I think of quotes as mini–instruction manuals for the soul. It.”

— Cheryl Strayed

259. “I’ve given you everything,” she insisted again and again in her last days. “Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

260. “It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.”

— Cheryl Strayed

261. “Who would I be if I didn’t? Who would I be if I did?”

— Cheryl Strayed

262. “Because when an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own humanity.”

— Cheryl Strayed

263. “No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You.”

— Cheryl Strayed

264. “When I wasn’t internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I’d heard over the course of my life – bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad.”

— Cheryl Strayed

265. “My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.”

— Cheryl Strayed

266. “There are so many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.”

— Cheryl Strayed

267. “You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. Anyone who expects you to has no sense of the arts.”

— Cheryl Strayed

268. “You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.”

— Cheryl Strayed

269. “Reading’s my reward at the end of the day.”

— Cheryl Strayed

270. “A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.”

— Cheryl Strayed

271. “You asked me when is the right time to tell your lover that you love her and the answer is when you think you love her. That’s also the right time to tell her what your love for her means to you. If you continue using avoidance as the main tactic in your romantic relationships with women, you’re going to stunt not only your happiness, but your life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

272. “When I say you don’t have to explain what you’re going to do with your life, I’m not suggesting you lounge around whining about how difficult it is. I’m suggesting you apply yourself in directions for which we have no accurate measurement. I’m talking about work. And love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

273. “I was working too hard to be afraid.”

— Cheryl Strayed

274. “I’ve learned so much as both a writer and a human.”

— Cheryl Strayed

275. “I had not lived a sheltered life. I’d had my share of hardships and sorrows. I thought I knew how the world worked, but this I could not believe. I thought that if it was known that bad things were happening to children, those bad things would be stopped. But that is not the sort of society we live in, I realized. There is no such society.”

— Cheryl Strayed

276. “I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back.”

— Cheryl Strayed

277. “Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

— Cheryl Strayed

278. “Water fell from the sky and dripped from the branches, streaming down the gully of the trail. I walked beneath the enormous trees, the forest canopy high above me, the bushes and low-growing plants that edged the trail soaking me as I brushed past. Wet and miserable as it was, the forest was magical – Gothic in its green grandiosity, both luminous and dark, so lavish in its fecundity that it looked surreal, as if I were walking through a fairy tale rather than the actual world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

280. “It’s not about becoming a movie star. It’s about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.”

— Cheryl Strayed

281. “But love doesn’t make a mean drunk not a mean drunk or a narcissist not a narcissist or a jackass not a jackass.”

— Cheryl Strayed

282. “I never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

— Cheryl Strayed

283. “Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.”

— Cheryl Strayed

284. “You’ve made it so long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.”

— Cheryl Strayed

285. “Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight.”

— Cheryl Strayed

286. “There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story.”

— Cheryl Strayed

287. “A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they’re in one. Its only defining quality is that it’s composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.”

— Cheryl Strayed

288. “The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.”

— Cheryl Strayed

289. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked as we looked together at the intricate drawings, reading bits about them in the paragraph of text on each page. “I don’t,” he said. “I believe we’re here once and what we do matters.”

— Cheryl Strayed

290. “I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. It.”

— Cheryl Strayed

291. “And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.”

— Cheryl Strayed

292. “You don’t have to be broken for me. I didn’t have to be broken for him, even though parts of me were. I could be every piece of myself and he’d love me still. My appeal did not rely on my weakness or my need. It relied on everything I was and wanted to be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

293. “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

294. “I’d loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they’d taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.”

— Cheryl Strayed

295. “Grief doesn’t have a face.”

— Cheryl Strayed

296. “Eddie sat on my other side, but I could not look at him. If I looked at him we would both crumble like dry crackers. I thought about my older sister, Karen, and my younger brother, Leif. About my husband, Paul, and about my mother’s parents and sister, who lived a thousand miles away. What they would say when they knew. How they would cry. My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.”

— Cheryl Strayed

297. “The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.”

— Cheryl Strayed

298. “The PCT had taught me what a mile was.”

— Cheryl Strayed

299. “As difficult and maddening as the trail could be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn’t offer up some form of what was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular – the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.”

— Cheryl Strayed

300. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed