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I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.

Cheryl Strayed

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Grieving
Though
Suffering
Mother
Without
Even
Terribly

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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.
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Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
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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.
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...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
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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.
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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.
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The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
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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.
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Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
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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.
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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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He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
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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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Not everyone wants to know everything their partner did. Maybe it's enough to say, Things aren't going well in our marriage. I've made mistakes. I don't think you've been a good partner to me. How do we go forward together? I think there's a different answer for every couple. But I think intimacy is asking that question.
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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.
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Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
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The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
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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.
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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.
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Jump high and hard with intention and heart.
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