Cheryl Strayed Quotes

I'm destined to be attracted to those I cannot defeat.

The weaker partner in a marriage is the one who loves the most.

I always feel like I'm the young one, I'm the small one.

I just want some time, Mikhail, to think things through. It’s frightening, the way I am about you. I think about you every minute; I want to touch you, just to know I can, to feel you beneath my fingers. It’s as if you crawled into my head and my heart, even my body, and I can’t get you out.

Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can scarely understand what has happened.

I have to go to her, Lucan. For my own sanity, if nothing else. If I stay here, I'm not sure what good I'd be, to tell you the truth. She's the only thing that's held me together in a very long time. I'm a wreck for this woman, my friend. She owns me now." - Rio

I wish I were worthy of his love. (Any love.)I should tell him to run. But I can't. I need him.

It is sad and wrong to be so dependent for the life of my life on any human being as I am on you; but I cannot by any force of logic cure myself at this date, when it has become second nature.

It’s just that I’m the kind of person,' Rebecca continued, 'that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.

Who am I kidding? I have no reason for being here other that the fact that I want to be near her.

I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego.

i want to stay with you." it was easier to say in the darkness, knowing as i spoke my voice would betray me, my hopeless addiction to him.

If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I'd be your slave.

I realized I was afraid of living without him. How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I’m not allowed a say in yours? But I had promised.

You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.

He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone.

Let me go.” “I can’t”, he said hoarsely, (…)” I’ve tried a hundred times to let you go, Victoria, but I can’t.

If she were gone I would be nothing. You should think better of yourself than to settle for that.

Love exists in powder. Love exists in pills. We are all addicts.

You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden these words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.

... i didn't fall in love of course it's never up to you but she was walking back and forth and i was passing through

Basic anxiety can be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted or endangered in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, humiliate, betray, envy... . And special in this is the child's feeling that the parents' love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity ... may be only a pretense.

She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.

To be labeled as a strong woman when you feel vulnerable is a strange place to be, because then you're, like, "Oh, I have to be strong now. But I don't feel strong. I feel alienated. I feel isolated. I feel that things are very surreal, and they're not authentic, and this is all just very overwhelming."