Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

403. “The unifying theme is resilience and faith.”

— Cheryl Strayed

404. “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

405. “No is golden. No is the kind of power the good witch wields.”

— Cheryl Strayed

406. “Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.”

— Cheryl Strayed

407. “I hope you can do that someday with someone else,” I said when he didn’t reply, though the very thought of that someone else pierced my heart. “I hope you can too,” he said. I sat in the darkness beside him, wanting to believe that I was capable of finding the kind of love I had with him again, only without wrecking it the next time around. It felt impossible to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

410. “Desperation is unsustainable.”

— Cheryl Strayed

411. “I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.”

— Cheryl Strayed

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

417. “I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The.”

— Cheryl Strayed

418. “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

419. “It will never be okay,” a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. “It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

421. “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

422. “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

423. “I learned then what I have learned in many other ways over the course of my life: that when we’re in the presence of someone else’s pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it’s a small thing. Like writing a letter.”

— Cheryl Strayed

424. “Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL.”

— Cheryl Strayed

425. “I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

427. “I was bypassing the High Sierra – missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses.”

— Cheryl Strayed

428. “I looked north, in its direction – the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I’d been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.”

— Cheryl Strayed

429. “By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I’ve never been.”

— Cheryl Strayed

430. “Every now and then I could see myself – truly see myself – and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was “the woman with the hole in her heart.” That was me. That was why I’d longed for a companion the night before. That was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking alone for three months on the PCT.”

— Cheryl Strayed

431. “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

432. “It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted – and yet it was impossible to do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

433. “In this sense, she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.”

— Cheryl Strayed

434. “I made a crumpled gesture with my hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.”

— Cheryl Strayed

435. “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

436. “My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.”

— Cheryl Strayed

437. “You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.”

— Cheryl Strayed

438. “My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale. It’s so simple it breaks my heart. How unspecial that fact is to so many, how ordinary for a child to wear a dress her grandmother bought her, but how very extraordinary it was to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

439. “We talk about our friends behind their backs. We do. Ask any social scientist who has studies human communication behaviors. Even you edmitted to doing this. Our friends are witnese to our attributes and flaws, our bad habits and good qualities, our contradictions and our contrivances. That they need to occasionally discuss the negative aspects or our lives and personalities in terms less than admiring is to be expected.”

— Cheryl Strayed

440. “Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.”

— Cheryl Strayed

441. “He said, “Don’t get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

442. “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.”

— Cheryl Strayed

443. “It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we’re brave enough to touch the rawest, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without pause and see – thrillingly, terrifyingly – that it was never her we had to fear. It was always only us.”

— Cheryl Strayed

444. “Testing yourself means relinquishing the things you believe have so far kept you safe or comfortable.”

— Cheryl Strayed

445. “The thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.”

— Cheryl Strayed

446. “What this requires of us is that we don’t get tangled up in the living, even when we in fact feel woefully tangled up. It demands that we focus not only on what’s happening in our stories, but also what our stories are about.”

— Cheryl Strayed

447. “These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

448. “Humans are beautifully imperfect and complex. We’re horny, ass-saving, ego-driven drug fiends, among other, more noble things.”

— Cheryl Strayed

449. “But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.”

— Cheryl Strayed

450. “The question isn’t whether you should stay or go. The question is: How would your life be transformed if you chose to love this time with all your intelligence?”

— Cheryl Strayed