Cheryl Strayed Quotes

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

I love writing and directing because it's great therapy. Every project I've done, there's been a personal connection.

I've always been one of those people that, if I am angry, I just hold it in. And I always kind of, like, wrote it in a song and put it aside for myself because it helps me get it out. It's almost like exercising; it's almost like that for me.

But I love to entertain. My vocation is to accrue all these experiences, to write about them, to get them out of my system, to not get sick, and then to share them publicly.

I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.

I just write about what makes me sad, and then when I write, I hear myself. It's like therapy, where I write something sad and then I make it happier or hopeful.

One of the difficulties of being a writer must be that you create drama that you can't live out. That's one of the wonderful things about acting.

Hate and anger and disappointment and rage can be channeled in music into the most positive place.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

I do my best to write my way through it. It helps the laughing, reflective part come quicker.

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself.

I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers.

nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.

I've always had a flare for the dramatic. I thought about being an actor and I thought about directing, but writing truly became something I needed to do, just to stay sane. It's my over-pressure valve.

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.

I think many writers write because it's a convenient way to explain themselves to themselves. We take the chaos and the turmoil and the bullshit of our lives, and we make it into something that has a harmonious shape and sound.

Writing is not just a job. It helps me to pray. It's a way of being.

I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.