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

252. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

265. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

273. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

278. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

281. “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

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. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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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294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

298. “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

299. “Because there is something worse than the I-can’t-live-without-her heartbreak hellspace you’re in right now, Afraid. It’s spending your life with a partner who, at her or his deepest core, does not want to be with you. It’s accepting a reluctant half love for fear that’s all you can get or deserve. It’s dangling eternally in doubt. It’s believing that a lie will keep you safe and the truth is where the danger lies.”

— Cheryl Strayed

300. “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