Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

About Cheryl Strayed:

Cheryl Strayed is an American memoirist, novelist and essayist. Strayed's personal essays have been published widely in national magazines and journals and have twice been selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays. She won a Pushcart Prize for her essay "Munro Country," which first appeared in The Missouri Review.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

This is how you get unstuck. You reach.

Cheryl Strayed

There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

Cheryl Strayed

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine ...

Cheryl Strayed

Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuck...

Cheryl Strayed

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

Cheryl Strayed

It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggl...

Cheryl Strayed

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 fear...

Cheryl Strayed

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is tr...

Cheryl Strayed

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make pictures like the kinds of p...

Cheryl Strayed

Very nice," said Rick after a while. "Very nice," he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. "What is?" I asked, turning to him, though I knew. "Everything," he said. And it was true.

Cheryl Strayed

I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity....

Cheryl Strayed

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

Cheryl Strayed

I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink. I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me ...

Cheryl Strayed

Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy f...

Cheryl Strayed

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my m...

Cheryl Strayed

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

Cheryl Strayed

As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was be...

Cheryl Strayed

I think it's neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me--just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we'd be better off.

Cheryl Strayed

He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again.

Cheryl Strayed

The father's job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it's necessary to do so. If you don't get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.

Cheryl Strayed

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...

Cheryl Strayed

Author Bio

  • NameCheryl Strayed
  • Descriptionauthor, memoirist, blogger
  • BornSeptember 17, 1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters; Blogger; Essayist
  • WorksTorch; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice On Love And Life From Dear Sugar; Wild: From Lost To Found On The Pacific Crest Trail