524 Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight.

I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body to the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure.

I’d loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they’d taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

Go because you want to go. Because wanting to leave is enough.

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.

You’ve made it so long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.

It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life.