Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay.”

— Cheryl Strayed

402. “The question about who you will love and when you will love him is out of your hands. It’s a mystery that you can’t solve.”

— Cheryl Strayed

403. “Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. It’s the man who opts not to invite his abusive mother to.”

— Cheryl Strayed

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “I never believed the boys were angry. I believed they were hurt and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow. It was the channel down which their impotent male rivers could rage.”

— Cheryl Strayed

409. “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

410. “I’m sorry,” she said and reached over and squeezed his leg. She couldn’t help but think that she’d ruined his life. It didn’t yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

412. “You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear.”

— Cheryl Strayed

413. “As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this – the hardest thing I’d ever done. 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

414. “Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

416. “True intimacy isn’t a psychodrama. It isn’t the “highest highs and lowest lows”. It’s communion and mellow compatibility. It’s friendship and mutual respect.”

— Cheryl Strayed

417. “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

418. “We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, where we say we love them or not.”

— Cheryl Strayed

419. “There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear that you’re not alone.”

— Cheryl Strayed

420. “What’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear? We don’t know – as a culture, as a gender, as individuals, you and I. The fact that we don’t know is feminism’s one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

422. “Of this I am absolutely sure: Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth. I know too many people who didn’t do those things. They all end up mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

423. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

425. “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

426. “The truest story is always the widest one. It’s the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.”

— Cheryl Strayed

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself – as I did every damn time – the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always.”

— Cheryl Strayed

431. “When you feel terrible because someone has gotten something you want, you force yourself to remember how very much you have been given. You remember that there is plenty for all of us. You remember that someone else’s success has absolutely no bearing on your own.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

433. “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

434. “I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I’d thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.”

— Cheryl Strayed

435. “You’re here. So be here, dear one. You’re okay with us for now.”

— Cheryl Strayed

436. “I still can’t entirely explain why I needed to leave my ex. I was tortured by this very question for years because I felt like such an ass for breaking his heart and I was so shattered I’d broken my own. I was too young to commit myself to one person. We weren’t as compatible as we initially seemed.”

— Cheryl Strayed

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “Where was my mother? I wondered. I’d carried her so long, staggering beneath her weight. On the other side of the river, I let myself think. And something inside of me released.”

— Cheryl Strayed

441. “I hated him and I loved him. With him I felt trapped, branded, held, and beloved. Like a daughter.”

— Cheryl Strayed

442. “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

443. “We didn’t exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.”

— Cheryl Strayed

444. “It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.”

— Cheryl Strayed

445. “An REI worker had encouraged me to buy a box of Spenco 2nd Skin – gel patches meant to treat burns that also happened to be great for blisters.”

— Cheryl Strayed

446. “One thing I never forgot from my Latin class is that a language that is descended from another language is called a daughter language. It was the beginning of the next era of my life, like this is of yours.”

— Cheryl Strayed

447. “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

448. “I think you need new boots,” he said when I showed him my feet, echoing Greg’s and Brent’s sentiments. “But I can’t get new boots. I don’t have the money,” I told him, no longer too ashamed to admit it. “Where’d you buy them?” asked Rex. “REI.” “Call them. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. They’ll replace them for free.” “They will?” “Call the 1-800 number,” he said. I.”

— Cheryl Strayed

449. “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

450. “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