Nobody Will Protect You From Your Suffering. You Can't Cry It Away Or Eat It Away Or Starve It Away Or

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

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

…compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got

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

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

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

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

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

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

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

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

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole

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

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

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

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

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

The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.

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