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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “It was all unknown to me then... everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true... It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”

— Cheryl Strayed

410. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

417. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.”

— Cheryl Strayed

427. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

429. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

431. “We act as if we don’t know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that’s changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

437. “These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

438. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “You say your marriage is “loveless” and perhaps you’re correct that your relationship has come to its natural end, but I’d like you to consider the notion that you aren’t the best judge of that right now. You’re a psychologically distressed drug addict with four kids, no health insurance, uncertain business prospects, and a pile of bills. I wouldn’t expect your marriage to be thriving. I doubt you’ve been.”

— Cheryl Strayed

450. “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