Welcome to our collection of Cheryl Strayed quotes! Cheryl Strayed is an American author, memoirist, and podcast host best known for her 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Through her writings, Cheryl has inspired many readers to live life to the fullest and find the courage to overcome life‘s obstacles. Here you will find a selection of the most inspiring and thought–provoking quotes from Cheryl Strayed.
Best Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
🟢“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact, I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Forgiveness doesn’t sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“How wild it was, to let it be.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” ~ Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don’t own other people’s crap.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“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.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.” ~ Cheryl Strayed, Cheryl Strayed Quotes on wild
🟢“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.” ~ Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“No’ is golden. ‘No’ is the kind of power the good witch wields. It’s the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.” ~ Cheryl Strayed, Cheryl Strayed Quotes on love
🟢“Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“The only way I’ve been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That’s where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.” ~ Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“The place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. it’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing as if the effort itself meant something.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you because it will.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Write like a motherfucker.” ~ Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“You get to define the terms of your life.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
🟢“Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding” ~ Cheryl Strayed
They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed Quotes On Love
🟢“Romantic love is not a competitive sport. Some of those women your boyfriend used to fuck have nicer asses than you. Some are smarter or funnier or fatter or more generous or more messed-up than you. That’s okay. That has no bearing on you whatsoever. You’re not up against those women. You’re running your own race. We don’t dig or not dig people based on a comparison chart of body measurements and intellectual achievements and personality quirks. We dig them because we do.”
“Go because you want to go. Because wanting to leave is enough.”
🟢“I can’t say when you’ll get love or how you’ll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it’s never too much to ask for it and that it’s not crazy to fear you’ll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. 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.”
🟢“If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior is so often not even about you. It’s about the person who is being unkind or jealous or petty or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say: ‘Don’t own other people’s crap.’”
🟢“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”
🟢“The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.”
🟢“There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let the man who doesn’t love you be one of them.”
🟢“To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.”
🟢“We have to be whole people to find whole love, even if we have to make it up for a while.”
🟢“You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.”
🟢“You don’t need those people. By stepping aside, they’ve done you a favor. Because what you’ve got left after the fools have departed are the old souls and the true hearts. Those are the über cool sparkle rocket mind-blowers we’re after. Those are the people worthy of your love.”
Cheryl Strayed Quotes On Life
🟢“Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.”
🟢“Allow your acceptance to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.”
🟢“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”
🟢“Be clear. Be direct. Be unwavering.”
🟢“Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. 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 and don’t hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out.”
🟢“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue.”
🟢“Forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you. Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or your relationship with the one who did you wrong.”
🟢“I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.”
🟢“I hope when people ask you what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: ‘Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire;’ or simply: ‘Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.’ And then smile very serenely until they say, ‘Oh.’”
🟢“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”
🟢“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible non believer in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of it’s complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”
🟢“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
🟢“So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.”
“The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.”
🟢“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
🟢“There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear you’re not alone. Most of us have an invisible inner terrible someone who says all sorts of nutty stuff that has no basis in truth.”
🟢“This is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.”
🟢“Trust your gut. Forgive yourself. Be grateful.”
🟢“We are here to build the house. It’s our work, our job, the most important gig of all: to make a place that belongs to us, a structure composed of our own moral code. Not the code that only echoes imposed cultural values, but the one that tells us on a visceral level what to do.”
🟢“We do not have the right to feel helpless. We must help ourselves. After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.”
🟢“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”
🟢“You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.”
Cheryl Strayed Is ‘Brave Enough Quotes
🟢”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.”
🟢”It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”
🟢“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”
🟢“Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough.”
🟢“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”
🟢“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
🟢“One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.Say thank you.”
🟢“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.”
🟢“The reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.”
🟢“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”
Popular Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“Desperation is unsustainable.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“I never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head.” – Cheryl Strayed.
“I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step. And then I ran.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“It’s a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“No’ is golden. ‘No’ is the kind of power the good witch wields.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“We all suffer. We all have heartbreak.” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?” – Cheryl Strayed.
🟢“You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards.” – Cheryl Strayed.
The Latest Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.”
🟢“I looked south, to where I’d been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me.”
🟢“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”
🟢“It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again.”
🟢“Jump high and hard with intention and heart.”
🟢“Just close your eyes and remember everything you already know.”
🟢“My mother’s death put me in touch with my most savage self.”
🟢“Perhaps by now, I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.”
🟢“There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear you’re not alone.”
🟢“What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was also what had got me here?”
Famous Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“‘We aren’t poor,’ my mother said, again and again. ‘Because we’re rich in love.’”
🟢“Be brave enough to break your own heart.”
🟢“Can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.”
🟢“Compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.”
🟢“I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.”
🟢“I do think that love is the greatest force on earth.”
🟢“I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.”
🟢“I remember being absolutely rocked to my core by how profoundly I could love another human being.”
🟢“I see myself both insignificant and profoundly connected to everything.”
🟢“I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back.”
🟢“I’ve learned so much as both a writer and a human.”
🟢“If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in.”
🟢“If there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core.”
🟢“My mom said there’s a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not.”
🟢“My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life.”
🟢“Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.”
🟢“Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.”
🟢“The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained.”
🟢“The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.”
🟢“There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let the man who doesn’t love you be one of them.”
🟢“There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness, except your own desperate heart.”
🟢“To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.”
🟢“We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs.”
🟢“What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?”
🟢“Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it’s very hard work.”
🟢“You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it.”
🟢“You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”
Inspiring Cheryl Strayed Quotes
🟢“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”
🟢“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out.”
🟢“Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.”
🟢“I considered my options. There was only one, I knew… To keep walking.”
🟢“I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”
🟢“I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.”
🟢“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.”
Love isn’t the only thing that’s sometimes complicated and sometimes simple. Truth is sometimes that way too.”
🟢“Men’s stories are seen as universal, women’s as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.”
“The only way out of a hole is to climb out.”
🟢“The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.”
🟢“There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.”
🟢“Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!”
🟢“You get to define the terms of your life.”
🟢“You will learn a lot from yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.”
Verdict
Cheryl Strayed has inspired us to keep our heads up and stay positive in difficult times. Her words of wisdom have been an invaluable source of strength and courage for many of us. Her words have encouraged us to never give up, no matter how tough life can be. Cheryl Strayed Quotes will always remain an inspiration to us all.