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

32 quotes

Quotes by Cheryl Strayed, 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, 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, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

"Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night."

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

"I think it's neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me--just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we'd be better off."

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

"In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit."

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

"What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?"

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

"It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn't have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me."

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

"There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise."

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

"I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother."

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

"But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too."

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

"Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd 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, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

"I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole."

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

"It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I’d found an actual planet that I didn’t know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain."

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

"Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs."

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

"A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone."

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

"The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many 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. (69)"

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

"Very nice," said Rick after a while. "Very nice," he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. "What is?" I asked, turning to him, though I knew. "Everything," he said. And it was true."

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

"And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade."

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

"I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full...I didn't feel like a big fate idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too."

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

"As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true."

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

"I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story."

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

"It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve."

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