Top 500 Cheryl Strayed Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “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

453. “I got you,” my friend the writer and teacher Jen Pastiloff says so often she has it tattooed on her arm. That’s what this vespers thing felt like to me, Spent. Like someone had me. Like for the tiniest glimmer of a moment I was held by a force more powerful than the force I could muster on my own.”

— Cheryl Strayed

454. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

461. “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

462. “I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.”

— Cheryl Strayed

463. “The sketches of your real life and your sister life are right there before you and you get to decide what to do. One is the life you’ll have; the other is the one you won’t. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won’t let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?”

— Cheryl Strayed

464. “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

465. “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

466. “I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

468. “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

469. “No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.”

— Cheryl Strayed

470. “In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind.”

— Cheryl Strayed

471. “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

472. “The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle.”

— Cheryl Strayed

473. “I can’t say when you’ll get love or how you’ll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it’s never too much to ask for it and that it’s not crazy to fear you’ll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It’s the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It’s worthy of all the hullabaloo.”

— Cheryl Strayed

474. “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

475. “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

476. “We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.”

— Cheryl Strayed

477. “I’ve long believed literature’s greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.”

— Cheryl Strayed

478. “Maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound, but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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

— Cheryl Strayed

480. “Divorcing him is the most excruciating decision I’ve ever made. But it was the wisest one too. And I wasn’t the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn’t have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear. To leave him was a kindness of a sort, though it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

— Cheryl Strayed

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Cheryl Strayed

485. “The air came alive with the sound of the wind whipping the trees at times and at other times it was profoundly hushed by the endless silencing snow. Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.”

— Cheryl Strayed

486. “She cried and her tears fell in the wrong direction. Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed. She.”

— Cheryl Strayed

487. “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

488. “It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild.”

— Cheryl Strayed

489. “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

490. “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

491. “You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to.”

— Cheryl Strayed

492. “I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady’s strong back, finally leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make.”

— Cheryl Strayed

493. “It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.”

— Cheryl Strayed

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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.”

— Cheryl Strayed

497. “Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.”

— Cheryl Strayed

498. “The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center.”

— Cheryl Strayed

499. “A proclamation of love is not inherently “loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.”

— Cheryl Strayed

500. “I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.”

— Cheryl Strayed