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

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

Cheryl Strayed

What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?

Cheryl Strayed

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

Cheryl Strayed

Grief doesn't have a face.

Cheryl Strayed

I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was ...

Cheryl Strayed

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

Cheryl Strayed

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

Cheryl Strayed

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was...

Cheryl Strayed

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting ...

Cheryl Strayed

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in t...

Cheryl Strayed

A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone.

Cheryl Strayed

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

Cheryl Strayed

This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years t...

Cheryl Strayed

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no...

Cheryl Strayed

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn't help but spill over into the ...

Cheryl Strayed

He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

Cheryl Strayed

As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction...

Cheryl Strayed

It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The...

Cheryl Strayed

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

Cheryl Strayed

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

Cheryl Strayed

.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

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