…we Are All, In The Private Kingdom Of Our Hearts, Desperate For The Company Of A Wise, True Friend.

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

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

We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

Cheryl Strayed

I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

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

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

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

My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.

Cheryl Strayed

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...

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

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

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

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

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

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

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