Cheryl Strayed Quotes

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

That's why I fell in love with country music: it made me feel something.

I have come to the conclusion there is no point making anything if you're not going to make people laugh and cry.

Sometimes we do derive some entertainment when we 'appreciate' something, and sometime we feel something when we're moved. So a lot of game makers want challenge themselves with 'can I move someone?' or 'can I get them to respect me as an artist?'

'Beloved' is a book that makes me cry.

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Cinema and emotion trump reality for me.

I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.

I'm always interested in hearing how other people read and react to my songs. I hadn't thought of it in just that way.

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

To me, music is emotion and if when you're listening to it and it doesn't make you feel that, then it's not music.

It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Each time I read a book, I cataloged the parts that struck me dumb with envy and admiration for their beauty and power and truth.

I feel I should try to reveal. When you hit it right, you produce an emotional response in the listener that can be cathartic. When you're wrong, you're soppy, sentimental.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.