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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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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Thing
Precisely
Experienced
Healing
Talking
Overestimated
Cannot
Miscarriage
Someone
Microscopic
Power
Exchange
Even
Flash

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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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
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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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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
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He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
Cheryl Strayed
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Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.
Cheryl Strayed
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...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
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
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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Write like a motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
Cheryl Strayed
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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
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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
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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