524 Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do what seems like the easiest thing to do – have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.

You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.

The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

Our most meaningful relationships are often those that continued beyond the juncture at which they came closest to ending.

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn’t embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days – those very days in which I was naming myself – I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.

He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered.

Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done such things with men based on far less.

If there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.

I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe.