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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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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
People
Cannot
Moves
Give
Convince
Anything
Absolutes
Ever
Absolute
Giving
Rule
Real
Waste
Time
Moving
Directions
Love
Else
Freely

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
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Be brave enough to break your own heart.
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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.
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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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I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.
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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.
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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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In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
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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.
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Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
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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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My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.
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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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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Music. I could not go without that. My mind would not let me be without music. I hiked the trail in 1995 - before there were iPods or music on our cell phones or even cell phones. So I was truly out there with just my thoughts. After a few days there was a continuous loop of songs playing silently in my mind.
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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