Be About Ten Times More Magnanimous Than You Believe Yourself Capable Of. Your Life Will Be A Hundred

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

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

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding

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

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

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

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

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

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

I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

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

It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.

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

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

The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.

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