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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

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Knowing
Novelists
Whatever
Shore
Didn
Ships
Beautiful
Sister
Nothing
Ghost
Important
Carry
Essayists
Never
Neither
Salute
Life
Choose
Ship

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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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.
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...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
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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.
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You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.
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He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.
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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.
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In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding
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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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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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
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He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
Cheryl Strayed
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Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
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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.
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Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.
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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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