01UndatedI'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.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
02UndatedHe 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 / quote ↗
03UndatedThe 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 / quote ↗
04UndatedI was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
05UndatedPerhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
06UndatedYou don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
08UndatedFear, 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. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
09UndatedTransformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
10UndatedWhat’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
11UndatedReal change happens on the level of the gesture. It's one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
12UndatedThis isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
13UndatedI 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. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets Power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
15UndatedI think it's neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me--just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we'd be better off.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
16UndatedThere'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 / quote ↗
17UndatedIn the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
19UndatedShe tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't between them anymore, maybe she could love him again.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
20UndatedYou go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can't go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
21UndatedYou 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.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
22UndatedBut as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn't mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
23UndatedWhat if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?Cheryl Strayed / quote ↗
