Cheryl Strayed quotes: dazzling quotes by the author.
“Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.”
“I know it’s a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it’s also f*cking fantastic. You are, after all, the only person you can change.”
“What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.”
“Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it to yourself.”
“Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there.”
“We do not have the right to feel helpless. We must help ourselves. After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.”
“Be clear. Be direct. Be unwavering.”
“Be about 10 times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.”
“But the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.”
“Thinking deeply about your choices and actions from the stance of your future self can serve as both a motivational and a corrective force.”
“The only way to override your limitations, insecurities, jealousies and ineptitude is to produce.”
“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherf*cking sh*t out of it.”
“This is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.”
“‘All right’ is almost always where we eventually land, even if we f*ck up entirely along the way.”
“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 and, my dear one, you and I have been granted a mighty generous one.”
“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
“We are here to build the house. It’s our work, our job, the most important gig of all: to make a place that belongs to us, a structure composed of our own moral code. Not the code that only echoes imposed cultural values, but the one that tells us on a visceral level what to do.”
“Trust yourself. It’s sugar’s golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”
“There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
“You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.”
“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”
“I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.”
“So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.”
“Writing is hard. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
“I know it’s hard to write. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do.”
“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.”
“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 of economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own 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.”
“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 is so often not even about you. It’s about the person who is being unkind or jealous or petty or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say: ‘Don’t own other people’s crap.'”
“Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.”
“But I encourage you to swallow your pride and hear your friends out, to look at the image of yourself they’re reflecting back to you. It might be useful. It might piss you off.”
“Forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you. Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or your relationship with the one who did you wrong.”
“Forgiveness doesn’t sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.”
“You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”
“Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.”
“You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.”
“You did things you didn’t hope to do. You have not always been your best self. This means that you’re like the rest of us.”
“Every last one of us can do better than give up.”
“I can’t say when you’ll get love or how you’ll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it’s never too much to ask for it and that it’s not crazy to fear you’ll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It’s the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It’s worthy of all the hullabaloo.”
“You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.”
“To love and be loved—that is the meaning of life.”
“Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady and don’t hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out.”
“The useless days will add up to something. The sh*tty 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.”
“This is not ‘how your story ends.’ It’s simply where it takes a turn you didn’t expect.”
“A glorious something else awaits.”
“You get to define the terms of your life.”
“The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life.”
“Allow your acceptance to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.”
“It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.”
“I mean: be your best, most gigantic self.”
“Trust your gut. Forgive yourself. Be grateful.”
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