As Difficult And Maddening As The Trail Could Be, There Was Hardly A Day That Passed That Didn't Offer

This is how you get unstuck. You reach.

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

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

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

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

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

Or just close your eyes and remember everything you already know. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.

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

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

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

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

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

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: 'Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire;' or maybe just: 'Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.' And then smile very serenely until they say, 'Oh.

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

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

Cheryl Strayed

“The void?” I'd asked, crestfallen. “It's a good thing, she said. It's the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it into something that's new and alive.”

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