Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.”

— Cheryl Strayed

352. “Only boring people get bored.”

— Cheryl Strayed

353. “You must love in order to be loved. You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included. You must give in order to receive.”

— Cheryl Strayed

354. “It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn’t spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I’d begun my hike, I hadn’t shed a single tear.”

— Cheryl Strayed

355. “But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

357. “I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives – those.”

— Cheryl Strayed

358. “I’m not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn’t feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn’t entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.”

— Cheryl Strayed

359. “The trees were tall, but I was taller.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

361. “La paura genera paura. La forza genera forza.”

— Cheryl Strayed

362. “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

363. “Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”

— Cheryl Strayed

364. “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

365. “You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.”

— Cheryl Strayed

366. “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

367. “Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.”

— Cheryl Strayed

368. “I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”

— Cheryl Strayed

369. “These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

370. “If love were an animal, what species would it be and could you train it? Love would be two animals: a hummingbird and a snake. Both are perfectly untrainable.”

— Cheryl Strayed

371. “We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.”

— Cheryl Strayed

372. “I had to do something hard so I could know my strength. I had to do something scary so I could find my courage. I had to do something alone so I could see who I was.”

— Cheryl Strayed

373. “The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering.”

— Cheryl Strayed

374. “You know how alchoholics who go to AA are always using that phrase “one day at a time”? They say that because to say “I will never drink again” is just too damn much. It’s big an hard and bound to fail.”

— Cheryl Strayed

375. “In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it’s a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.”

— Cheryl Strayed

376. “Love would be two animals: a hummingbird and a snake. Both are perfectly untrainable.”

— Cheryl Strayed

377. “You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success.”

— Cheryl Strayed

378. “You must do everything you can to get what you want and need, to find “that type of love.” It’s there for you. I know it’s arrogant of me to say so, because what the hell do I know about looking like a monster or a beast? Not a thing. But I do know that we are here, all of us – beasts and monsters and beauties and wallflowers alike – to do the best we can. And every last one of us can do better than give up.”

— Cheryl Strayed

379. “She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.”

— Cheryl Strayed

380. “How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles over rugged mountains and waterless deserts if I couldn’t even budge it an inch in an air-conditioned motel room? The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to.”

— Cheryl Strayed

381. “Your ultimatum is simple. It’s fair. And it’s stating your own intentions, not what you hope theirs will be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

382. “The answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right-wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we’re angry or scared or in pain. We are a complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.”

— Cheryl Strayed

383. “But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.”

— Cheryl Strayed

384. “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

385. “The Dream of a Common Language.”

— Cheryl Strayed

386. “But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.”

— Cheryl Strayed

387. “There’s nothing you can tell Sugar that doesn’t strike her as beautiful and human. Which is why men and women write to her about intimacies they can’t share with anyone else, unspeakable urges, insoluble grief. She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.”

— Cheryl Strayed

388. “She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.”

— Cheryl Strayed

389. “Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with sitting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our life, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there.”

— Cheryl Strayed

390. “Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

— Cheryl Strayed

391. “The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center.”

— Cheryl Strayed

392. “Burn me,” she said finally. “Turn me to ash.” And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I’d expected. They weren’t like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they’d once been bones.”

— Cheryl Strayed

393. “I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.”

— Cheryl Strayed

394. “I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing.”

— Cheryl Strayed

395. “That mystery is not the curse of our existence; it’s the wonder. It’s what people are talking about when they talk about the circle of life that we’re all part of whether we sign up to be or not – the living, the dead, those being born right this moment, and the others who are fading out.”

— Cheryl Strayed

396. “Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before.”

— Cheryl Strayed

397. “One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

398. “It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

399. “We are all savages inside. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

400. “When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties.”

— Cheryl Strayed