Cheryl Strayed Quotes

People have asked me about playing outsiders. I don't consider myself an outsider. Maybe that's why I'm interested in that. I'm not really sure.

As a kid I had all kinds of questions about how I fit it with my neighborhood and friends and other Latinos.

One day we will finally see that when we reject any person or group of people, we reject a part of our very selves. All are one. All are in. All are God's beloved children with a place at the table.

The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum-total of that life is God.

After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.

How can you get very far, If you don't know who you are? How can you do what you ought, If you don't know what you've got? And if you don't know which to do Of all the things in front of you, Then what you'll have when you are through Is just a mess without a clue Of all the best that can come true If you know What and Which and Who.

You get more insight as you get older, on everything. I kind of woke up one morning and was like, 'Oh I see what's happening, I get everything'. I woke up and was like, 'I get it, I'm a product'.

I will remember what I was, I am sick of rope and chains - I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs. I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar cane; I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs. I will go out until the day, until the morning break - Out to the wind's untainted kiss, the water's clean caress; I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake. I will revisit my lost love and playmates masterless!

Her clarity gave her purpose and her purpose gave her clarity.

Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

I've learned over the years that identity has a whole lot less to do with location or other people's expectations than with your own sense of self and self-confidence.

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.

Nature loves simplicity and unity.

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am.