Cheryl Strayed Quotes

...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

I needed to run away in order to come home.

Sometimes you need to break away from something in order to know how much you need or want it.

I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

If people have some sort of yearning, dissatisfaction or some itching irritability, then it might because they aren't looking in the right direction for a solution. They aren't looking within.

In my mind I'm going to Carolina. Can't you see the sunshine, can't you just feel the moonshine? Ain't it just like a friend of mine, to hit me from behind, and I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind.

Someone who seeks the Way doesn't look beyond himself.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

He whose pure mind turns inward and searches whence does this 'I' arise, knows the Self and merges in You, the Lord, as a river into the sea.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for

Initiation means the Journey Inwards: nothing is changed or can be changed; but all is trulier understood with every step.

I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.

In life you only have to travel 6 inches. That is the distance from your mind to your heart.

If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.

I hoped that the trip would be the best of all journeys: a journey into ourselves.

A wise man travels to discover himself.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.