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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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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Write
Find
Right
Writing
Edit
Edits
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Figures
More quotes by Cheryl Strayed
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.
Cheryl Strayed
Write like a motherfucker.
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
What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
Cheryl Strayed
I was trying to find a new home in the world.
Cheryl Strayed
In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
Cheryl Strayed
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.
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
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
Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.
Cheryl Strayed
One of the scandalous things I did was as I read them afterward I would burn them. I loved them, but for practical reasons I had to lighten the load. I burned favorites, like William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. There's a whole list in the back of my book. It's me,[Adolf] Hitler, [Benito] Mussolini, and Pol Pot. We're the book burners.
Cheryl Strayed
I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, Tenth of December. He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.
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 felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
Cheryl Strayed
But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.
Cheryl Strayed
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.
Cheryl Strayed
Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.
Cheryl Strayed
Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
Cheryl Strayed
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
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