Cheryl Strayed Quotes

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost

Sometimes when you're putting the work in it just seems so, so hard, and you never know when that work's going to pay off.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

how hard you worked for what you wanted. how cruelly fate betrayed you in the end.

Should I give up or should I just keep chasing pavement, even if it leads nowhere?

It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

It was the fact that they tried so hard that doomed them.

Well, I started out down a dirty road Started out all alone And the sun went down as I crossed the hill And the town lit up, the world got still I'm learning to fly but I ain't got wings Coming down is the hardest thing Well, the good ol' days may not return And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn I'm learning to fly but I ain't got wings Coming down is the hardest thing Well, some say life will beat you down Break your heart, steal your crown So I've started out for God knows where I guess I'll know when I get there I'm learning to fly around the clouds But what goes up must come down

When you're experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion.

To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei

Not everything is about beating your head against the wall until it breaks.” “Just most things.

You can still achieve certain things through effort, struggle, determination, and sheer hard work or cunning. But there is no joy in such endeavor, and it invariably ends in some form of suffering.

I know there are certain things that I just can't win.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?" I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?" To shrug.

We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; Today will die tomorrow; Time stoops to no man's lure.

I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.

I don't want to lose hope.

A new world will be won not by those who stand at a distance with their arms folded, but by those who are in the arena, whose garments are torn by storms and whose bodies are maimed in the course of the contest.

I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known.

I'm lost, but I'm hopeful.