Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “We’re all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

357. “Small things such as this have saved me: How much I love my mother – even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

359. “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

360. “A caldera, it’s called – a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

361. “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

362. “THE RECKONING Dear Sugar, I am the lucky mama of one darling baby and oh, how I treasure every moment! Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on how you look at it – the baby’s daddy does not follow suit on treasuring every moment.”

— Cheryl Strayed

363. “Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.”

— Cheryl Strayed

364. “We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

366. “Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.”

— Cheryl Strayed

367. “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

368. “You did things you didn’t hope to do. You have not always been your best self. This means that you’re like the rest of us.”

— Cheryl Strayed

369. “I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. “You’re a seeker,” my mother had said to me when she was in her last week, lying in bed in the hospital, “like me.” But I didn’t know what my mother sought, exactly. Did she?”

— Cheryl Strayed

370. “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

371. “Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.”

— Cheryl Strayed

372. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

374. “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

375. “The only place I could reach her. In me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

376. “This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.”

— Cheryl Strayed

377. “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

378. “You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings...”

— Cheryl Strayed

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “Ultimatums have negative connotations for many because they’re often used by bullies and abusers, who tend to be comfortable pushing their partners’ backs against a wall, demanding that he or she choose this or that, all or nothing. But when used by emotionally healthy people with good intentions, ultimatums offer a respectful and loving way through an impasse that will sooner or later destroy a relationship on its own anyway.”

— Cheryl Strayed

384. “That both things could be true at once – my disbelief as well as my certainty – was the unification of the ancient and the future parts of me. It was everything I intended and yet still I was surprised by what I got.”

— Cheryl Strayed

385. “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

386. “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

387. “The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives.”

— Cheryl Strayed

388. “One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

389. “There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.”

— Cheryl Strayed

390. “There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”

— Cheryl Strayed

391. “There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.”

— Cheryl Strayed

392. “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

393. “Bring the man you aspire to be, the one who already has the love he longs for. Play every piece of yourself and play it with all you’ve got until you’re not playing anymore. That’s what Cary Grant did. The lonely boy who lost his mom in the fog of his father’s deceit found himself in the magic of wanting to be. His name was Archibald Leach.”

— Cheryl Strayed

394. “The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky.”

— Cheryl Strayed

395. “She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again.”

— Cheryl Strayed

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

399. “If I believed in God, I’d see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. That would have been true regardless of the outcome of Emma’s surgery. It would have been the grace that carried you through even if things had not gone as well as they did, much as we hate to ponder that.”

— Cheryl Strayed

400. “It was all unknown to me then... everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true... It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”

— Cheryl Strayed