Cheryl Strayed is an American memoirist, novelist, essayist, and podcast host. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in anthologies and major magazines. These Cheryl Strayed quotes will motivate you.
Best Cheryl Strayed Quotes
- “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
- “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
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“Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.” ~ 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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“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
- “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 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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.” ~ 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.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
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“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing as if the effort itself meant something.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
- “You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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.
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 -
“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
- “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.” ~ Cheryl Strayed
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“You get to define the terms of your life.” ~ 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
- “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
- “How wild it was, to let it be.” ~ 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
- “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
- “Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.” ~ Cheryl Strayed, Cheryl Strayed Quotes on love
- “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
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“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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.” ~ 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
- “Write like a motherfucker.” ~ Cheryl Strayed Quotes
- “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
- “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
- “Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding” ~ Cheryl Strayed
