...the Death Of My Mother Was The Thing That Made Me Believe The Most Deeply In My Safety: Nothing Bad

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

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

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!

Cheryl Strayed, Torch

I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

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

You 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 you 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 or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

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

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

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

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

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives-those fountains of inconvenient feeling-and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

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

If, as a culture, we don't bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don't - if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live - well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

Cheryl Strayed, The Love Of My Life

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

Cheryl Strayed

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely... But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.

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