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I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

Cheryl Strayed

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Knew
Often
Tougher
True
Loud
Earth
Anyway
Even
Absolutely
Way
Answer
Always
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More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.
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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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In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
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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 ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
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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.
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I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.
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What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
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In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.
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I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
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It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.
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Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I'm always interacting with people or with my computer or phone.
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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.
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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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Be brave enough to break your own heart.
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My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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