Cheryl Strayed Quotes

I'm in a period of growth and expansion. I'm taking long, hard looks at the world and what's happening in it, analyzing and thinking. I'm trying to become acquainted with the universe - with the part of it I occupy - and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it is.

When you're seventeen to early twenties, that's the time you're trying to work out who you are. If you're trying to make some kind of artistic or creative impact, that's the age when you start to figure out how to do that.

College was such a pivotal time for me. It's a time when you have so much growth, and you kind of can choose one of many different paths.

Everything about who I am, negative and positive, is what shaped me.

No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.

All your life you've paid attention to your experiences, but never to yourself.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the picture is the same one you see when you look in the mirror?" - "That's the eternal question, isn't it? Are we born who we are, or do we make ourselves that way?

I think when you're 25 you're still finding yourself, and you should have the freedom of that.

I feel like with everything you do, everything you make, everything you experience, y'know, even the dumb stuff that you don't even really pay much attention to, like the mundane stuff that happens to you every day, it shapes the person who you are.

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

The path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being--one of many ways--and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.

Not only does travel give us a new system of reckoning, it also brings to the fore unknown aspects of our own self. Our consciousness being broadened and enriched, we shall judge ourselves more correctly.

Your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own minds.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

It's the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.

The older I've gotten, the more I've learned that I have to open myself up to all opportunities. Maybe I'll get burned and not meet the right people, but I won't know until I do it.

I want to feel that every trip I make has enhanced me as a person.

The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.

I had to examine myself very thoroughly to find the right path personally.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

In your 20s, you're just a sketch of what you think you're trying to be.

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

I think, if you put a camera in anyone's life and document it daily from the age of 21 to 27, there are going to be things that aren't always pretty.

What you don't get necessarily at drama school is a gigantic mix of people. At university, there's people from every social background, and you get to go through that period of being naive and not quite sure who you're going to be.