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. “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

353. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

356. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “Only boring people get bored.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

379. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

386. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

388. “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

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. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

395. “The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “Anything else? To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed