Cheryl Strayed Quotes

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

You know those little snow globes that you shake up? I always thought my brain was sort of like that. You know, where you just give it a shake and watch what comes out and shake it again. It's like that.

I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you.

We skim over the surface thoughtlessly. But we must acknowledge that thinking well is a time-consuming process. We can't expect instant results. We have to slow down a bit, and take the time to contemplate, meditate, and even pray. It is the only route to a more meaningful and efficient existence.

...there's nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.

I like to laze around. I think that's a huge part of creativity. You have to let your mind relax and then another part of your brain suddenly connects with the solution you're trying to find.

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

I'm just thinking all the time. There are times when I don't really need to think. You know what I mean? If you think about stuff for five hours, you really only need to do like five minutes and the rest of sort of rehashing it and dramatically going over it.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

I sometimes think that I think too much. Sometimes I envy the ignorant. I envy people who can just turn it off and be blissful and not care. But that isn't me. I just have never found a way.

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feed pulled to.

You grow your best thoughts in silence, solitude, and meditation. When you relax and think deeply, you are giving your inmost powers their best opportunity to disclose themselves.

When I'm riding in a car, I don't really listen to music. I turn the radio off and just be thinking, brainstorming. I'm one of these people that just like to brainstorm.

I feel like the movie is reminding people of who they are, which is what I think all great art does.

Do you always think this much? It's just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.

How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!

And with joy you realize for the first time "Thinking's just like not thinking — So I don't have to think any more".

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions.

It's a real stumper to sit around and try to think in your own head, but when you go into somebody else's head that takes the foot off the breaks. You can think in someone else's head.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

Don't think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.

I write to find out what I think.