Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “What are your spiritual beliefs? I do not believe in God as most people conceive of God, but I believe there is a divine spirit in each of us. I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “The Dream of a Common Language.”

— Cheryl Strayed

414. “But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.”

— Cheryl Strayed

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

420. “Desperation is unsustainable.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

422. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

424. “My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn’t. We were no longer married, and as I settled alongside the Three Young Bucks into the bed I used to share with Paul, I felt a kind of acceptance of that, a kind of clarity where there’d been so much uncertainty.”

— Cheryl Strayed

425. “These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

426. “I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing.”

— Cheryl Strayed

427. “All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.”

— Cheryl Strayed

428. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

430. “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

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. “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

433. “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

434. “I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn’t let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead.”

— Cheryl Strayed

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

439. “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

440. “Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.”

— Cheryl Strayed

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “And it was true. I always would have guessed it, even all the time that I feared it would never happen. Being there that night was the meaning of my life. Getting there had been my every intention. When I say you don’t have to explain what you’re going to do with your life, I’m not suggesting you lounge around whining about how difficult it is. I’m suggesting you apply yourself in directions for which we have no accurate measurement. I’m talking about work. And love.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

450. “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