Quote

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.

Cheryl Strayed

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Looks
Risk
Fractured
Hard
Seeing
Essayists
Love
Story
Intimacy
Stories
Allowing
Light
Beloved
Look
Deeply
Human
Constantly
Humans
Relationship

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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