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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.

Cheryl Strayed

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Cheryl Strayed
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 17
Blogger
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spangler
Pennsylvania
Something
Ways
Make
Decision
Good
Happened
Life
Wrong
Making
Find
Decisions
Right
Ones
Much
Learned

More quotes by Cheryl Strayed

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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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All of us, as we mature and grow up - if we're doing life right - we evolve.
Cheryl Strayed
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Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.
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My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.
Cheryl Strayed
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And every last one of us can do better than give up.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.
Cheryl Strayed
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It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
Cheryl Strayed
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How wild it was, to let it be.
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.
Cheryl Strayed
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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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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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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.
Cheryl Strayed
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My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up - and I'm that person for sure.
Cheryl Strayed
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...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
Cheryl Strayed
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He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
Cheryl Strayed