Cheryl Strayed: Universal Voice

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

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

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

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.
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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

She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again.
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

When you're speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.
-Cheryl Strayed