524 Quotes by Cheryl Strayed

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.

I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother away. Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright – to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

I’ve given you everything,” she insisted again and again in her last days. “Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret. Small things that stung now: all the times I’d scorned her kindness by rolling my eyes or physically recoiled in response to her touch;.

Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

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

One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret.

A glorious something else awaits.