There Are Stories You'll Learn If You're Strong Enough To Travel There. One Of Them Might Cure You.

I didn't know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.

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

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.

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

This is how you get unstuck. You reach.

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

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

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. ...we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire...

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

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue.

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

I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

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

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

...but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.

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

I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn't walk even one more step. And then I ran.

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