524 Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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.

And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time – it could be years from now – when you’ll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you’re going to hesitate. You’re going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you’re going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.

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 gun that didn’t have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me.

Will you do it later or will you do it now?

The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write – really that’s exactly what you need to write.

Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched.

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.

Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.

I never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.