32 Most Inspirational Cheryl Strayed Quotes

Cheryl Strayed is an American novelist, memoirist essayist, and podcast host. She is the author of the memoir Wild, number-one New York Times best-selling. At the age of 22 years, Cheryl found herself frazzled with two major life events: the sudden death of her mother from cancer and then her husband wanted a divorce and her young marriage came to an end.

After suffering this loss, Cheryl decided to tackle her emotional pain by walking over 1,000 miles along the trail in the Pacific Crest. In her book, “Wild” explains how she met with colorful characters along her way as she desperately tried to find stability and inner peace.

Oprah Winfrey was inspired by this story and revived her largely popular book cold and “Wild” was the inaugural selection during the inauguration of Oprah’s Book Club 2.0

Strayed personal struggles and her story of survival inspire and motivate crowds. Cheryl Strayed is a motivational speaker with her moving rhetoric echos with audiences of all sizes. This article gives you a collection of Cheryl Strayed quotes that will inspire you and help you improve your life.

Cheryl Strayed Quotes

1. “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.”– Cheryl Strayed.

2. “I’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.

3. “But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.”– Cheryl Strayed.

4.” Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be ‘over it’ by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind..soul-crushingly life altering.”– Cheryl Strayed.

5. “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.

6. “He reached over and touched his finger very delicately to the edge of one of its straps, near my collarbone, but instead of pushing it down and off my shoulder as I thought he would, he ran his finger slowly along then upper edge of my bra in front and then traced it all the way down around the bottom. I watched his face while he did this. It seemed more intimate than kissing him had. By the time he’d finished outlining the whole thing, he’d barely touched me and yet I was so wet I could hardly stand up.”– Cheryl Strayed.

Read ->  Alan Turing's Most Fascinating Quotes

7. “I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her. My whole life sort of ended when my mom died. I had to remake it again and be a new person in the world without my mom. It was a very primal rebirth, that time after my mom died.”– Cheryl Strayed.

8. “Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother — even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.”– Cheryl Strayed.

9. “We do not have the right to feel helpless. We must help ourselves. After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.”– Cheryl Strayed.

10. “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.

11. “There is no why. You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding. And, dear one, you and I both were granted a mighty generous hand.”– Cheryl Strayed.

12. “Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn’t needed to get anything from my pack; I’d only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”– Cheryl Strayed.

13. “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.”– Cheryl Strayed.

14. “I 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.

15. “Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do.”– Cheryl Strayed.

16. “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.

17. “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 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.

Read ->  The Most Extraordinary Quotes from Man's Search for Meaning

18. “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.”– Cheryl Strayed.

19. “Allow your acceptance to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.”– Cheryl Strayed.

20. “Forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you. 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 your relationship with the one who did you wrong”– Cheryl Strayed.

Related: Quotes from The Alchemist

21. “My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.”– Cheryl Strayed.

22. “We act as if we don’t know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that’s changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.”– Cheryl Strayed.

23. “Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.”– Cheryl Strayed.

24. “There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear you’re not alone. Most of us have an invisible inner terrible someone who says all sorts of nutty stuff that has no basis in truth.”– Cheryl Strayed.

25. “So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word ‘love’ to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.”– Cheryl Strayed.

26. “You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who , and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”– Cheryl Strayed.

Read ->  59 Most Memorable Liberty Prime Quotes

27. “We aren’t poor,’ my mother said, again and again. ‘Because we’re rich in love.”– Cheryl Strayed.

28. “Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.”– Cheryl Strayed.

29. “I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.”– Cheryl Strayed.

30. “Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.”– Cheryl Strayed.

31. “There are so many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.”– Cheryl Strayed.

32. “I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step. And then I ran.”– Cheryl Strayed.

Cheryl Strayed Video – Official Movie Trailer for Wild

This is the official movie trailer featuring Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed.

The movie was well done and had strong appeal. If you haven’t seen it, check out the trailer and watch the movie this week.a

Related: Inspiring Quotes about Hiking

Summary
In conclusion, Cheryl Strayed is a great author went through many life struggles to overcome addiction and other personal problems. Her famous book Wild tells her journey of passage from one stage of her life to another and how she overcome these issues with her own solo hiking adventure.

People thought she should not do this solo adventure but she took on the challenge and succeeded. It pushed her to the brink and challenged her on every level. The book has strong appeal to people, especially women, going through life challenges.

We hope these quotes inspire you with whatever issues you are facing and help you overcome your life struggles.

Image Credit: Graeme Mitchell, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Leave a Comment