524 Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

I've given you everything", she insisted again and again in her last days. "Yes, " I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She did. She's come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

When I wasn't internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I'd heard over the course of my life - bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad.

To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. 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.

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.

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. It's the reason... we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

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.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

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.

…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.