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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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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Must
Regret
Feels
Clean
Trying
Cutting
Way
Pretty
Void
Good
System
Cure
People
Purpose
Cures
Inspirational
Heal
Feel
Seemed

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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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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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.
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The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.
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Jump high and hard with intention and heart.
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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.
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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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Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
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The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.
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I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
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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.
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Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding
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I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.
Cheryl Strayed
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What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
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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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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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 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.
Cheryl Strayed
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He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
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There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.
Cheryl Strayed
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Not everyone wants to know everything their partner did. Maybe it's enough to say, Things aren't going well in our marriage. I've made mistakes. I don't think you've been a good partner to me. How do we go forward together? I think there's a different answer for every couple. But I think intimacy is asking that question.
Cheryl Strayed