Quotessence
Home / Authors / Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

Famous Cheryl Strayed Quotes

“It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely...and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.”

“A lot of artists give up because it's just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don't give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They've taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What’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.”

“Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get the same thing... Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same: I want love and I'm afraid I'll never get it. It's hard to answer those letters because I'm an advice columnist, not a fortune-teller. I have words instead of a crystal ball. I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it.”

“Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall 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.”

“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.”

“He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life. Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was about to happen. But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I'd realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really - all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.”