“ It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve. Cheryl Strayed
“ I have breathed my way through so many people I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn't change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes… Cheryl Strayed
“ I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story. Cheryl Strayed
“ Then you'd sob and sob and sob so hard you couldn't stand up until finally you'd go quiet and your head would weigh seven hundred pounds and you'd lift it from your hands and rise to walk into the bat… Cheryl Strayed
“ 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. Cheryl Strayed
“ I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full...I… 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
“ When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for the… Cheryl Strayed
“ I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: 'Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human moti… 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 you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your ed… Cheryl Strayed
“ Very nice," said Rick after a while. "Very nice," he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. "What is?" I asked, turning to him, though I knew. "Everything," he said. And it was true. Cheryl Strayed
“ It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking h… Cheryl Strayed
“ But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got. Cheryl Strayed
“ The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to d… Cheryl Strayed
“ I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, ma… Cheryl Strayed
“ There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them. Cheryl Strayed
“ My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love. Cheryl Strayed
