If, As A Culture, We Don't Bear Witness To Grief, The Burden Of Loss Is Placed Entirely Upon The Bereaved,

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

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

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

Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. 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

...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

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

I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.

Cheryl Strayed

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

‘No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.

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

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days- those very days in which I was naming myself- I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

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

…go to a bookstore and buy ten books of poetry and read them each five times. Because the truth is inside.

Cheryl Strayed  (when asked to give one piece of advice to people in their twenties)

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.

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