So Write... Not Like A Girl. Not Like A Boy. Write Like A Motherfucker.

...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

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

Cheryl Strayed

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

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

If I could go back in time I'd make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn't know what I couldn't know until I became a mom, and so I'm certain there are things I don't know because I can't know because I did. Who would I have nurtured had I not been nurturing my two children over these past seven years? In what creative and practical forces would my love have been gathered up? What didn't I write because I was catching my children at the bottoms of slides and spotting them as they balanced along the tops of low brick walls and pushing them endlessly in swings? What did I write because I did? Would I be happier and more intelligent and prettier if I had been free all this time to read in silence on a couch that sat opposite of Mr. Sugar's? Would I complain less? Has sleep deprivation and the consumption of an exorbitant number of Annie's Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies taken years off my life or added years onto it? Who would I have met if I had bicycled across Iceland and hiked around Mongolia and what would I have experienced and where would that have taken me? I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

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

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

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

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!

Cheryl Strayed, Torch

“The void?” I'd asked, crestfallen. “It's a good thing, she said. It's the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it into something that's new and alive.”

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

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

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

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