Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.”

— Cheryl Strayed

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

406. “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

407. “This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. 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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

427. “Desperation is unsustainable.”

— Cheryl Strayed

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

431. “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

432. “These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

444. “Small things such as this have saved me: How much I love my mother – even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.”

— Cheryl Strayed

445. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

448. “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

449. “To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising – the very half that makes rising necessary – is having first been nailed to the cross.”

— 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