Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayedis an American memoirist, novelist, and essayist. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in national magazines and anthologies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 September 1968
CitySpangler, PA
CountryUnited States of America
powerful philosophy sunset
It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.
book writing waiting
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.
believe hundred magnanimous
Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.
believe winning fake
If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.
love-is giving littles
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.
life letting-go fighting
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
school sunset butterfly
My family didn't go to church. Once when I slept over at the house of a friend, her parents brought me to Sunday school with her. I was given this little pamphlet of tiny poems about the natural world, about butterflies and sunsets. My 7-year-old self was so astounded by how these few words were creating pictures and feelings in me.
real moving waste
Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.
believe stories about-yourself
You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.
light risk looks
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.
literature
I really came to literature through poetry.
simple complicated made
That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.
jealousy often-is people
If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don't own other people's crap.
self choices up-to-you
Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.