Cheryl Strayed
My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.
I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.
Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't.
Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.
My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.
A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.
One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it's tedious and monotonous. You're bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head.
I've learned so much as both a writer and a human.
I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.
I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living.
My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up - and I'm that person for sure.
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 befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.Collection: Inspirational
You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.Collection: Love
Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.Collection: Moving Forward
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.Collection: Impossible
If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don't own other people's crap.Collection: Jealousy
I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Love Is
Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.Collection: Running
Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.Collection: Self
My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.Collection: Mom
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.Collection: Bravery
The only way out of a hole is to climb out.Collection: Way
You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.Collection: Years
You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.Collection: Real
You get to define the terms of your life.Collection: Term
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.Collection: Sacred
Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.Collection: Running
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.Collection: Motivational
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.Collection: Jobs
I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.Collection: Answers
The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.Collection: Love
Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.Collection: Believe
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.Collection: Healing
I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.Collection: Way
The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.Collection: Horse
I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life," she'd wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. "I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me." "Oh, Mom," was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else."Collection: Inspirational
The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.Collection: Inspirational
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 of what the story means.Collection: Art
There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.Collection: Heart
It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.Collection: Gay
Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.Collection: Men
She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't between them anymore, maybe she could love him again.Collection: Regret
In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.Collection: Twenties
When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.Collection: Daughter
I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.Collection: Crazy
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.Collection: Memories
The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you've not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you're still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your stealing-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and a thief, does that make you good?Collection: Liars
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. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that tonight that if it hadn't been for Eddie, I wouldn't have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.Collection: Boulders