...but Thinking About It Didn't Do A Thing. Thinking About It Was A Long Dive Into A Bucket Of Shit That

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

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

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love

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

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt… You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding...

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

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

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

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

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

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

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

...The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching's universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

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

Accept that this experience taught you something you didn't want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it's going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

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