524 Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

This is not “how your story ends”. It’s simply where it takes a turn you didn’t expect.

You can’t replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.

There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

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.

What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart.

It was a world I’d never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I’d staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been.

I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn’t realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.

The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it’s especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.