110+ Cheryl Strayed Quotes On Her Mor, Empowering And Inspiring

Cheryl Strayed is an American novelist, memoirist, essayist, and podcast host. She is best known for her 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was later adapted into a film of the same name starring Reese Witherspoon. Strayed is also the author of the novel Torch, the New York Times best-selling collection of essays Tiny Beautiful Things, and the novel Brave Enough. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Cheryl Strayed on love, life, her mor.

Top 10 Cheryl Strayed Quotes

1. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
2. What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
3. Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.
4. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
5. The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
6. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.
7. Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.

Cheryl Strayed Short Quotes

• Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.
• I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
• Write like a motherfucker.
• I remember being absolutely rocked to my core by how profoundly I could love another human being.
• He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.
• Wanting to leave is enough.
• Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
• I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.
• I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.
• The only way out of a hole is to climb out.

Cheryl Strayed Quotes About Love

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. — Cheryl Strayed

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. — Cheryl Strayed

I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn't realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex. — Cheryl Strayed

People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love. — Cheryl Strayed

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

A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is. — Cheryl Strayed

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them. — Cheryl Strayed

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got. — Cheryl Strayed

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love. — Cheryl Strayed

The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve. — Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed Quotes About Life

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. — Cheryl Strayed

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

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. — Cheryl Strayed

It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be. — Cheryl Strayed

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

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means. — Cheryl Strayed

Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I'm always interacting with people or with my computer or phone. — Cheryl Strayed

I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please. — Cheryl Strayed

My whole life sort of ended when my mom died. — Cheryl Strayed

My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home. — Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed Quotes About Inspiring

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

How wild it was, to let it be. — Cheryl Strayed

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. — Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — Cheryl Strayed

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. Don't own other people's crap. — Cheryl Strayed

When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything. — Cheryl Strayed

The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. — Cheryl Strayed

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real. — Cheryl Strayed

Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms. — Cheryl Strayed

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. — Cheryl Strayed

No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives. — Cheryl Strayed

The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write. — Cheryl Strayed

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. — Cheryl Strayed

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness. — Cheryl Strayed

My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty. — Cheryl Strayed

Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way. — Cheryl Strayed

Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. 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. — Cheryl Strayed

The only way I've been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That's where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world. — Cheryl Strayed

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it. — Cheryl Strayed

Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place. — Cheryl Strayed

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand. — Cheryl Strayed

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. 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. — Cheryl Strayed

"The Dream of a Common Language" by Adrienne Rich. I carried it the entire hike. On my first night, when I felt like I was in too deep, I read the first poem out loud to myself over and over. — Cheryl Strayed

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. — Cheryl Strayed

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated. — Cheryl Strayed

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. — Cheryl Strayed

It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant. — Cheryl Strayed

Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night. — Cheryl Strayed

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here? — Cheryl Strayed

My mom died when I was 22. My stepfather, who I loved like a father, pretty quickly got involved with another woman. Suddenly there was another woman sleeping in my mother's bed, and it was very difficult. Their relationship brought up my profound loss, and the truth was that my family would never be the same again. — Cheryl Strayed

My family didn't go to church. Once when I slept over at the house of a friend, her parents brought me to Sunday school with her. I was given this little pamphlet of tiny poems about the natural world, about butterflies and sunsets. My 7-year-old self was so astounded by how these few words were creating pictures and feelings in me. — Cheryl Strayed

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart. — Cheryl Strayed

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh. — Cheryl Strayed

One of the scandalous things I did was as I read them afterward I would burn them. I loved them, but for practical reasons I had to lighten the load. I burned favorites, like William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." There's a whole list in the back of my book. It's me,[Adolf] Hitler, [Benito] Mussolini, and Pol Pot. We're the book burners. — Cheryl Strayed

And if you're gonna be a writer, you just truly have to be a writer. You have to throw yourself into it and deal with the negative consequences of that. And there are negative consequences. I mean, there are. But, it's also true that you wouldn't be interviewing me right now if I had worked at the post office. You wouldn't. I would be still writing, but I wouldn't have gotten as far as I've gotten, because I wouldn't have had the time. — Cheryl Strayed

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

I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me. — Cheryl Strayed

Music. I could not go without that. My mind would not let me be without music. I hiked the trail in 1995 - before there were iPods or music on our cell phones or even cell phones. So I was truly out there with just my thoughts. After a few days there was a continuous loop of songs playing silently in my mind. — Cheryl Strayed

There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are. — Cheryl Strayed

...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross. — Cheryl Strayed

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 your 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. — Cheryl Strayed

Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't. — Cheryl Strayed

Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no. — Cheryl Strayed

I was trying to find a new home in the world. — Cheryl Strayed

The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which. — Cheryl Strayed

I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no. — Cheryl Strayed

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. 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

I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living. — Cheryl Strayed

That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts. — Cheryl Strayed

The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. — Cheryl Strayed

Acceptance is a small quiet room. — Cheryl Strayed

I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. — Cheryl Strayed

He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale. — Cheryl Strayed

Don't worry. Don't apologize. Don't cower behind the defeated security of there is no 'room for someone like me'. There isn't room for any one of us. It's up to you to make a place for yourself in the world. So get to work. — Cheryl Strayed

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

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

I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous. — Cheryl Strayed

Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn't think I could do that. — Cheryl Strayed

Jump high and hard with intention and heart. — Cheryl Strayed

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here. — Cheryl Strayed

The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work. — Cheryl Strayed

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives. — Cheryl Strayed

We are savages insides. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn't a person reading this who hasn't at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else. — Cheryl Strayed

Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed. — Cheryl Strayed

Going down (descending), I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yard on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. — Cheryl Strayed

…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had. — Cheryl Strayed

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us." — Cheryl Strayed

You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don't, it's a living death. You're just standing in one place dying. — Cheryl Strayed

Be brave enough to break your own heart. — Cheryl Strayed

On my hike my brain was left to wander. That was often maddening because it was tedious and monotonous sometimes, but then my the mind would take over, and that's when I'd start hearing the music in my head or thinking deeply about people I know or things that I didn't even know I remembered anymore. Those thoughts would be there. I wouldn't have had them otherwise. — Cheryl Strayed

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost — Cheryl Strayed

The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself. — Cheryl Strayed

I've learned so much as both a writer and a human. — Cheryl Strayed

When someone you love truly dies, you have to find them over and over again in the world, and I think you do that on a very psychic, unconscious level, and I think in some ways I was calling out to that spirit of my mother when I saw the fox. It doesn't surprise me it's in animals that I find my mother. — Cheryl Strayed

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

Of course some people manage to write books really young and publish really young. But for most writers, it takes several years because you have to apprentice yourself to the craft, and you also have to grow up. I think maturity is connected to one's ability to write well. — Cheryl Strayed

When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes. — Cheryl Strayed

Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered. — Cheryl Strayed

I am an advocate of honesty and openness, and I think deceit is a dangerous seed to plant and let grow in relationships. — Cheryl Strayed

The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. — Cheryl Strayed

My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up - and I'm that person for sure. — Cheryl Strayed

She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't between them anymore, maybe she could love him again. — Cheryl Strayed

Life Lessons by Cheryl Strayed

1. Cheryl Strayed teaches us that it is possible to find strength and courage in ourselves, even in the face of adversity.
2. She also shows us that it is important to take risks and to be open to new experiences and opportunities.
3. Finally, her work emphasizes the importance of self-care, self-compassion, and resilience in the face of life's challenges.