Quote

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

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Fun
Small
Thing
Burnt
Healing
Ordinary

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.
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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.
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Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding
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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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What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.
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All of us, as we mature and grow up - if we're doing life right - we evolve.
Cheryl Strayed
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I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
Cheryl Strayed
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Write like a motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed
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Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.
Cheryl Strayed
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I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.
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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Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
Cheryl Strayed
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The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
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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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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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
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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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I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living.
Cheryl Strayed