Writing Is Hard....Coal Mining Is Harder. Do You Think Miners Stand Around All Day Talking About How

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

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

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.

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

…compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got

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

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

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

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

Be fearless enough to let love transform you.

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

We must help ourselves… After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.

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

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

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives-those fountains of inconvenient feeling-and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

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

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

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