If There's One Thing I Believe More Than I Believe Anything Else, It's That You Can't Fake The Core.

Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be over your daughter's death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they're being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain of your daughter's death. They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.

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

In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Cheryl Strayed

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

This is how you get unstuck. You reach.

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

Or just close your eyes and remember everything you already know. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.

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

...the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

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

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

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

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

Cheryl Strayed

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

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

There is no cure except to live the hell out of our lives, to take it apart, to put it back together, to dig it all up, and then fill the hole. To help ourselves and one another to the best of our abilities. To believe everything entirely, while also calling bullshit for what it is.

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