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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.

Cheryl Strayed

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
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Spangler
Pennsylvania
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More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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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.
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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.
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Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.
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And every last one of us can do better than give up.
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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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I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
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It's a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
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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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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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Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.
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Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It was so painful not to tell her that in fact I was Sugar, but I didn't.
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You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
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Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.
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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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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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Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.
Cheryl Strayed
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Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
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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 ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
Cheryl Strayed
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You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.
Cheryl Strayed