Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Perhaps being among the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I, too, could be undesecrated... the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

302. “Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

303. “I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe.”

— Cheryl Strayed

304. “It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.”

— Cheryl Strayed

305. “Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power.”

— Cheryl Strayed

306. “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

307. “I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.”

— Cheryl Strayed

308. “As close as we’d been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true.”

— Cheryl Strayed

309. “Rise to the occasion of your one and only heart.”

— Cheryl Strayed

310. “I’m also reminded of how those words no longer belong only to me; how, when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.”

— Cheryl Strayed

311. “These are not pretty things, but they are true things.”

— Cheryl Strayed

312. “To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.”

— Cheryl Strayed

313. “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose.”

— Cheryl Strayed

314. “It’s wrong that this is required of you. It’s wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.”

— Cheryl Strayed

315. “I could only be who it seemed I had to be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

316. “You’re clear that you don’t want to act on your crush, so trust that clarity and be grateful that you have it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

317. “How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

318. “I never did make that Thanksgiving dinner. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around eight months after my mom died, my family was something I spoke of in the past tense.”

— Cheryl Strayed

319. “It felt ancient. Knowing. Utterly and profoundly indifferent to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

320. “At a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us.”

— Cheryl Strayed

321. “I’d entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan.”

— Cheryl Strayed

322. “We are here to build the house.”

— Cheryl Strayed

323. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

324. “I never found a way to write about it until I wrote this letter to you, Ruler, when I realized it was a story you needed to hear. Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out – though surely there’s something there too – but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.”

— Cheryl Strayed

325. “Our minds are small, but our hearts are big.”

— Cheryl Strayed

326. “Don’t worry about it too much. You’re green, but you’re tough. And tough is what matters the most out here. Not just anyone could do what you’re doing.”

— Cheryl Strayed

327. “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

328. “If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. It’s about the person who’s being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say: Don’t own other people’s crap. The world would be a better place if we all did that.”

— Cheryl Strayed

329. “Just as I’d seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn’t have a face.”

— Cheryl Strayed

330. “Be brave. Write what’s true for you. Write what you think. What about what confuses you and compels you. Write about the crazy, hard, and beautiful. Write what scares you. Write what makes you laugh and write what makes you weep. What what makes you feel ashamed or proud. Writing is risk and revelation. There’s no need to show up at the party if you’re only going to stand around with your hands in your pockets and stare at the drapes.”

— Cheryl Strayed

331. “We have to be whole people to find whole love, even if we have to make it up for a while.”

— Cheryl Strayed

332. “What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done?”

— Cheryl Strayed

333. “In mijn dagelijkse pre-PCT-leven hield ik al van boeken, maar tijdens de voettocht kregen ze een diepere betekenis. ZE vormden de wereld waarin ik mezelf kon laten gaan wanneer de realiteit te eenzaam, hard of moeilijk werd om te verdragen.”

— Cheryl Strayed

334. “She loved us more than all the named things in the world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

335. “Love many, trust few, and always paddle your own canoe.”

— Cheryl Strayed

336. “You have a bundle on your head, sweet pea. And though that bundle may be impossible for you to see right now, it’s entirely visible to me. You aren’t torn. You’re only just afraid.”

— Cheryl Strayed

337. “It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.”

— Cheryl Strayed

338. “Letting go of expectation when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.”

— Cheryl Strayed

339. “Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done such things with men based on far less.”

— Cheryl Strayed

340. “There are stories hidden in the language we use, whether we’re conscious of them or not. They tell the truth of our hearts and minds.”

— Cheryl Strayed

341. “Nella vita ci sono un’alba e un tramonto ogni giorno. E tu puoi scegliere di essere presente, puoi metterti sulla strada della bellezza.”

— Cheryl Strayed

342. “You aren’t afraid of love. You’re afraid of all the junk you’ve yoked to love. And you’ve convinced yourself that withholding one tiny word from the woman you think you love will shield you from that junk.”

— Cheryl Strayed

343. “Do you know what boundaries are? The best, sanest people on the planet do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

344. “Hard as I fought for it to be otherwise, finally I had to admit it too: without my mother, we weren’t what we’d been; we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope.”

— Cheryl Strayed

345. “The people in my life were like the BandAids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.”

— Cheryl Strayed

346. “Naked and smiling” is one male friend’s only requirement for a lover. Perhaps it’s because men are people with bodies full of fears and insecurities and shortcomings of their own. Find one of them. One who makes you think and laugh and come. Invite him into the tiny revolution in your beautiful new world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

347. “A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn’t let it define your life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

348. “It was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls enchanting the city.”

— Cheryl Strayed

349. “I hope you will be surprised and knowing at once. I hope you’ll always have love. I hope you’ll have days of ease and a good sense of humor.”

— Cheryl Strayed

350. “But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.”

— Cheryl Strayed