Your Assumptions About The Lives Of Others Are In Direct Relation To Your Naïve Pomposity. Many People

You might, for example, be interested to know that the word prestigious is derived from the Latin praestigiae, which means conjuror's tricks. Isn't that interesting? This word that we use to mean honorable and esteemed has its beginnings in a word that has everything to do with illusion, deception, and trickery.

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

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love

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

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

There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

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

I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

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

Accept that this experience taught you something you didn't want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it's going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

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

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 happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives-those fountains of inconvenient feeling-and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

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

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