You Will Regret The Small Thing You Didn't Say For The Rest Of Your Life. Say Thank You.

Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be over your daughter's death 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-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they're being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain of your daughter's death. They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

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

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

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

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.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man [or woman] who doesn't love you be one of them.

Cheryl Strayed

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

Cheryl Strayed

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

Cheryl Strayed

There is no cure except to live the hell out of our lives, to take it apart, to put it back together, to dig it all up, and then fill the hole. To help ourselves and one another to the best of our abilities. To believe everything entirely, while also calling bullshit for what it is.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts

Cheryl Strayed

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar