Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

353. “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

354. “Only boring people get bored.”

— Cheryl Strayed

355. “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

356. “I’d been a girl forever, after all, familiar with and reliant upon the powers my very girlness granted me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “That your friends have those opinions, however, does not mean that they don’t love you or value you as a friend or otherwise think you are one of the best people they know.”

— Cheryl Strayed

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

368. “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

369. “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

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. “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

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. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

375. “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

376. “He reminded me of all the golden boys I’d known in my life- classically handsome and charmingly sure of his place at the very top of the heap, confident that the world was his and that he was safe in it, without ever having considered otherwise.”

— Cheryl Strayed

377. “I didn’t look like a woman who might need twelve condoms.”

— Cheryl Strayed

378. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

380. “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

381. “La paura genera paura. La forza genera forza.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

388. “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

389. “He taught you how to love like you’ve never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you’ve never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.”

— Cheryl Strayed

390. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

392. “That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

393. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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