Don't Lament So Much About How Your Career Is Going To Turn Out. You Don't Have A Career. You Have A

Letting go of expectation when it comes to one's children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

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

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

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

As difficult and maddening as the trail could be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn't offer up some form of what was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular-the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.

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

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

You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.

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

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

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

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

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

...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