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44 Soul-Smashingly Beautiful Cheryl Strayed Quotes That Will Break You Open And Set You Free

Because wanting to leave is enough.
Heidi Priebe
December 15, 2016
“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?”
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Tagged: Redemption, forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, Mistakes, Making Mistakes
“There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Judging Others, Jealousy, Bitterness, Pride
“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, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Life, Journey, purpose, Faith, Hope, Dreams
“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted was a way in. I was there now. Or close.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Tagged: Loss, Starting Over, Acceptance, Resisting Change
“You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding and my dear one, you and I have been granted a mighty generous one.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Life, Dealing With Life
“But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Jackass, kindness, Self-awareness, Self-improvement
“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 or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Happiness, Joy, Warning, Advice, Life
“I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Doing The Right Thing, Right, Wrong, Responsibility, Intuition, Trusting Yourself, Trusting Your Gut
“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, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: forgiveness
“You have to say 'I am forgiven' again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: forgiveness, Forgiving Yourself
“Fear begets fear. Power begets power. ”
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Tagged: Fear, Power, Mindset, Perception
“There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Unrequited Love
“I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Loneliness, Community, Love
“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Truth, Personal Truth, Integrity, Trust, Trusting Yourself
“Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.
So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Love, Withholding Love
“Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Self-Perception, Self-Esteem, Faking It Until You Make It
“Be brave enough to break your own heart.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Bravery, Courage, strength, Heartbreak
“The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you've not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you're still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your stealing-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and a thief, does that make you good?”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Guilt, Self-Loathing, Perceptioin
“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.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Grief, Re-invention
“ You're so outraged and surprised this shitty thing happened to you that there's a piece of you that isn't yet convinced it did. You're looking for the explanation, the loophole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course. Anyone would be. It's the reason I've had to narrate my own stories of injustice about seven thousand times, as if by raging about it once more the story will change and by the end of it I won't still be the woman hanging on the end of the line.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Pain, Injustice, Anger
“Wanting was a wilderness.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Tagged: Desire, Wanting, Wanting Someone You Can't Have
“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.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Writing, Working, Working Hard, Passion
“Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“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. It’s about the person who’s being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say: Don’t own other people’s crap.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough
Tagged: Negativity, Positivity
“You can't fake the core. ”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Honesty, Truth, Personal Truth
“Forgiveness doesn't mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. 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 define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: forgiveness, Moving Forward, Moving On
“We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we made up to oppress other people.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Life
“This is not your responsibility but it is your problem.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Life
“Just because you leave someone doesn't mean the relationship is over. It goes on.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
Tagged: Life
“How wild it was, to let it be.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Tagged: Lit quotes, Literary Quotes