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I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.
Cheryl Strayed
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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Surprising
Carried
Survive
Carry
Needed
Back
Amazed
More quotes by Cheryl Strayed
I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.
Cheryl Strayed
You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding and my dear one, you and I have been granted a mighty generous one.
Cheryl Strayed
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
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
The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
Cheryl Strayed
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
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
So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.
Cheryl Strayed
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
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
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
Write like a motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed
The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write.
Cheryl Strayed
How wild it was, to let it be.
Cheryl Strayed
In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.
Cheryl Strayed
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
Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.
Cheryl Strayed
People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
Cheryl Strayed
Jump high and hard with intention and heart.
Cheryl Strayed
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.
Cheryl Strayed
