Quote

In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

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
Well
Going
Asshole
Twenties
Becoming
Wells
Might

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

Image
You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
Write like a motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
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
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
I think being a woman alone enhanced the impulse in others to be generous. What we're told is that to be a woman alone is to be in a dangerous situation. The message is that people are gong to prey on you and do bad things to you. That may be true in some cases, but what I experienced was the other case.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
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