Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “When it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair. If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we’ve fallen before. I hope you will remember that the next time you fail.”

— Cheryl Strayed

255. “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

256. “You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

269. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

291. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “Grief doesn’t have a face.”

— Cheryl Strayed

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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