Alone Had Always Felt Like An Actual Place To Me, As If It Weren't A State Of Being, But Rather A Room

Put yourself in the way of beauty.

Cheryl Strayed, quoting her mother’s advice

That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts

Cheryl Strayed

Writing is hard....Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

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

What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.

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

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.

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

It was a deal I'd made with myself months before and the only thing that allowed me to hike alone. I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.

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

If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees

Cheryl Strayed

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man [or woman] who doesn't love you be one of them.

Cheryl Strayed

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

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