Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages
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“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“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, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“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, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from 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, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“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, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“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, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. 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 full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me?
The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“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, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“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, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“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.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“The clamor of 'What have I gotten myself into?' was a mighty shout. It could not be drowned out. The only possible distraction was my vigilant search for rattlesnakes. I expected one around every bend, ready to strike. The landscape was made for them, it seemed. And also for mountain lions and wilderness-savvy serial killers.
But I wasn't thinking of them.
It was a deal I'd made with myself months before and the only thing that allowed me to hike alone. 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.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“You can be in love and still feel incredibly lonely. You can have everything you ever wanted, only to realize that you wanted all the wrong things. You can have a husband as smart and sexy and compassionate as mine, and yet not really have him at all.”
― Lisa Gardner, quote from The Neighbor
“I was falling in love with her, and she was falling in love with me. It was fated, decided before any of us were born, and I hated it as much as I loved it. I could barely stand it. (Eric)”
― Shannon A. Thompson, quote from Minutes Before Sunset
“When they awakened at four o'clock in the afternoon, all was quiet. Duke peeked out the door and closed it quickly.
'What do the initials M.P. stand for?' he inquired.
'Shore Patrol,' answered Trapper John.”
― quote from MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
“With simple tasks such as typing, driving, or playing golf and tennis, we reach our highest level of proficiency after about 50 hours of practice; then our performance skills become automated. We’re able to execute them smoothly and with minimal effort, but further development stops. We assume we’ve reached our highest performance level, and we don’t think to learn new and better methods.”
― Kerry Patterson, quote from Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
“No,” he replied, firmly, smoothing her hair back from the side of her face. “I'll never leave you
alone again. You've spent too many years always having to be the strong one, never having anyone to
rely upon. It stops now, Taylor. What I heard changes nothing when it comes to how I feel about you. I
respect you in a way I've never respected anyone before. Share this burden with me. You've been strong
long enough. Let me shoulder it from here on out. I promise you, I won't fail you.”
― Rose Wynters, quote from My Wolf Protector
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