Quote

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

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
True
Mean
Trusting
Already
Living
Means

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

Image
Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.
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
Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
Write like a motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
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
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
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
What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
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
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
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
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
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
With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
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 had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.
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