It Seemed To Me The Way It Must Feel To People Who Cut Themselves On Purpose. Not Pretty, But Clean.

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

There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. Only a present that builds and creates itself as the past withdraws.

character of Evelyn, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, paraphrasing Goethe

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely... But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

...but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

...The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching's universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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