I Can't Tell You What To Do. No One Can. But As The Mother Of Two Children, I Can Tell You What Most

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

The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.

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

In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Cheryl Strayed

You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.

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

If, as a culture, we don't bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don't - if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live - well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

Cheryl Strayed, The Love Of My Life

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

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

That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts

Cheryl Strayed

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

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

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man [or woman] who doesn't love you be one of them.

Cheryl Strayed