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Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

Cheryl Strayed

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Ideas
Sugar
Surrender
Anymore
Joy
Idea
True
Used

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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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
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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
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You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.
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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
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My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.
Cheryl Strayed
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I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
Cheryl Strayed
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What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
Cheryl Strayed
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The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.
Cheryl Strayed
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Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, Tenth of December. He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.
Cheryl Strayed
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What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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Write like a motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed
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The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
Cheryl Strayed
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...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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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