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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

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Writing
Simply
Miners
Every
Stand
Mining
Men
Talking
Included
Think
Lasts
Coal
Thinking
Last
Straight
White
Mines
Around
Mine
Hard
Harder

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
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All of us, as we mature and grow up - if we're doing life right - we evolve.
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So much of what I've learned, so much of what's good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.
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I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn't realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.
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Be brave enough to break your own heart.
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You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.
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Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
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Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it
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Write like a motherfucker.
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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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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.
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When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.
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What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
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The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
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In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
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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.
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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.
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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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I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
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You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.
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