I Know It's Hard To Know What To Do When You Have A Conflicting Set Of Emotions And Desires, But It's

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

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

Cheryl Strayed

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

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

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It's strength. It's nerve.

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

I had to change…Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be.

Cheryl Strayed

...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

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

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

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

Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. 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

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