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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
Beautiful
Sister
Nothing
Ghost
Important
Carry
Essayists
Never
Neither
Salute
Life
Choose
Ship
Knowing
Novelists
Whatever
Shore
Didn
Ships

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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I was trying to find a new home in the world.
Cheryl Strayed
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But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it
Cheryl Strayed
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It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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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
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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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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
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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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
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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
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...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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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
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I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.
Cheryl Strayed
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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