There's No Way To Know What Makes One Thing Happen And Not Another. What Leads To What. What Destroys

This is how you get unstuck. You reach.

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

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it 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

Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be over your daughter's death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they're being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain of your daughter's death. They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.

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

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

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

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!

Cheryl Strayed, Torch

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely... But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.

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

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

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

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