Quote

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

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
Long
Wonder
Sex
Shave
Something
Hours
Poetry
Diaries
Things
Reading
Arms
Wondering
People
Story
Becoming
Journal
Whether
Novel
Collections
Jobs
Dead
Novels
Waitressing
Stories
Walks
Add
Meandering
Writing
Days
Useless
Shitty

More quotes by 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
Jump high and hard with intention and heart.
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
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.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
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
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
I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
And every last one of us can do better than give up.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
How wild it was, to let it be.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
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
Image
It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
Cheryl Strayed
Image
I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
Cheryl Strayed