524 Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

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

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. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.

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.

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 familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: 'Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire;' or maybe just: 'Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.'And then smile very serenely until they say, 'Oh.

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them?THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

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.