The Unifying Theme Is Resilience And Faith. The Unifying Theme Is Being A Warrior And A Motherfucker.

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.

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

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. ...we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire...

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

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it's not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage!

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

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

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

...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

I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower…Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away.

Cheryl Strayed

Be your best, most gigantic self. Which sometimes, for a tiny bit, means faking it.

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

We must help ourselves… After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.

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