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
Cheryl Strayed quotes about
dark night vastness
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.
giving-up believe dont-give-up
The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
writing artist doom-and-gloom
People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
way causes knows
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
years grace age
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.
beautiful important ships
I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
tree pebbles branches
I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.
book writing forget
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.
way yearning wanted
I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
mother strong stars
Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
reading mentor december
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.
inspirational
How wild it was, to let it be.
writing figures edits
I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
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.