“ But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too. Cheryl Strayed
“ I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully fo… Cheryl Strayed
“ I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have gu… Cheryl Strayed
“ 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. Cheryl Strayed
“ It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgli… Cheryl Strayed
“ The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you. ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you… Cheryl Strayed
“ She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wr… Cheryl Strayed
“ There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. 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 a… Cheryl Strayed
“ The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated. Cheryl Strayed
“ He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale. Cheryl Strayed
“ The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. You have… Cheryl Strayed
“ When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice. Cheryl Strayed
“ Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I… Cheryl Strayed
“ It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that. Cheryl Strayed
“ In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. Cheryl Strayed
“ I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those fou… Cheryl Strayed
