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Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed Quotes

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Famous Cheryl Strayed Quotes

“I 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.”

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Book:Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
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“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.”

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Book:Brave Enough: A Mini Instruction Manual for the Soul
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“I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life," she'd wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. "I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me." "Oh, Mom," was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else."”

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Book:Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found
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“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.”

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Author:Cheryl Strayed
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“When I woke the next morning in my room at White's Motel, I showered and stood naked in front of the mirror, watching myself solemnly brush my teeth. I tried to feel something like excitement but came up only with a morose unease. Every now and then I could see myself-truly see myself-and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was 'the woman with the hole in her heart'. That was me.”

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Book:Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found
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