Cheryl Strayed citations

Page 2

“It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.”

“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”

“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.”

“I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.”

“But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.”

“He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.”

“You get to define the terms of your life.”

“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”

“Hello, fear. Thank you for being here. You’re my indication that I’m doing what I need to do.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who'd kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.”

“You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding.”

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me”

“What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?”

“Reading's my reward at the end of the day”

“The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”

“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.”

“It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.”

“He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.”

“Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.”

“I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.”

“In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

“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.”

“Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too.”

“Writing is hard…. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”