I Could Feel Myself Disintegrating Inside Myself Like A Past-bloom Flower…Every Time I Moved A Muscle,

There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. Only a present that builds and creates itself as the past withdraws.

character of Evelyn, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, paraphrasing Goethe

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

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

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 obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.

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

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

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

It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

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

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

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.

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