Writing Is Part Intuition And Part Trial And Error, But Mostly It's Very Hard Work.

Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

...the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days- those very days in which I was naming myself- I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Be fearless enough to let love transform you.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely... But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

I had to change…Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be.

Cheryl Strayed

If I could go back in time I'd make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn't know what I couldn't know until I became a mom, and so I'm certain there are things I don't know because I can't know because I did. Who would I have nurtured had I not been nurturing my two children over these past seven years? In what creative and practical forces would my love have been gathered up? What didn't I write because I was catching my children at the bottoms of slides and spotting them as they balanced along the tops of low brick walls and pushing them endlessly in swings? What did I write because I did? Would I be happier and more intelligent and prettier if I had been free all this time to read in silence on a couch that sat opposite of Mr. Sugar's? Would I complain less? Has sleep deprivation and the consumption of an exorbitant number of Annie's Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies taken years off my life or added years onto it? Who would I have met if I had bicycled across Iceland and hiked around Mongolia and what would I have experienced and where would that have taken me? I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar