That's How We Find Our Way Outward And Onward. By Holding Onto Beauty Hardest. By Cradling It Like The

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt… You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding...

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

We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

Cheryl Strayed

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

Cheryl Strayed

...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

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

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding

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

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

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

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

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

As difficult and maddening as the trail could be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn't offer up some form of what was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular-the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.

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

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