There Is No Past That We Can Bring Back By Longing For It. Only A Present That Builds And Creates Itself

“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

…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)

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

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

Writing is hard....Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

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

I know it's hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it's not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do-have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don't think there's a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself-as I did every damn time-the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I'm learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I've still got work to do.

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

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

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

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

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

If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. It’s about the person who’s being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker it would say: Don’t own other people’s crap. The world would be a better place if we all did that.

Cheryl Strayed