Be Your Best, Most Gigantic Self. Which Sometimes, For A Tiny Bit, Means Faking It.

“The void?” I'd asked, crestfallen. “It's a good thing, she said. It's the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it into something that's new and alive.”

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

So write... Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.

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

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

It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

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

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

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

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

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

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: 'Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire;' or maybe just: 'Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.' And then smile very serenely until they say, 'Oh.

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