The Useless Days Will Add Up To Something. The Shitty Waitressing Jobs. The Hours Writing In Your Journal.

Or just close your eyes and remember everything you already know. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. Only a present that builds and creates itself as the past withdraws.

character of Evelyn, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, paraphrasing Goethe

At a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days- those very days in which I was naming myself- I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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