I've learned so much as both a writer and a human. Cheryl Strayed More Quotes by Cheryl Strayed More Quotes From Cheryl Strayed Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you. Cheryl Strayed believekidsthinking 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. Cheryl Strayed fakewinningbelieve The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. Cheryl Strayed wildernesswoodsway Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. Cheryl Strayed magnanimoushundredbelieve Write like a motherfucker. Cheryl Strayed writing 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. Cheryl Strayed waitingwritingbook Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves. Cheryl Strayed overcoming-fearbraverystories The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated. Cheryl Strayed miscarriagehealingtalking 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-placesdarknessnames Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here. Cheryl Strayed 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. Cheryl Strayed doom-and-gloomartistwriting Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. Cheryl Strayed writingmenthinking 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. Cheryl Strayed vastnessdarknight 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. Cheryl Strayed novelistsdyingway How wild it was, to let it be. Cheryl Strayed inspirational The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself. Cheryl Strayed horsejobschildren The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. Cheryl Strayed lighthealingdark Until we as a gender refuse to wear any shoe that would be uncomfortable to walk a mile in, we’re perfectly screwed. Cheryl Strayed gendershoeswould-be Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no. Cheryl Strayed crazyanswerslong The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write. Cheryl Strayed writinggivingthinking
