Quotes From "Wild: From Lost To Found On The Pacific Crest Trail" By Cheryl Strayed

I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. Cheryl Strayed

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Cheryl Strayed

I'd read the section in my guidebook about the trail's history the winter before, but it wasn't until now–a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat–that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who'd created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they'd been imagining me. It didn't matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That's what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me. . Cheryl Strayed

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets Power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid. . Cheryl Strayed

I think it's neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me--just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we'd be better off. Cheryl Strayed

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. Cheryl Strayed

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit. Cheryl Strayed

What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? Cheryl Strayed

It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn't have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me. Cheryl Strayed

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. Cheryl Strayed

I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me. Cheryl Strayed

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. Cheryl Strayed

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too. Cheryl Strayed

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real. Cheryl Strayed

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole. Cheryl Strayed

It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I’d found an actual planet that I didn’t know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain. Cheryl Strayed

Grief doesn't have a face. Cheryl Strayed

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs. Cheryl Strayed

A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone. Cheryl Strayed

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn't help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical sufferings some of my emotional suffering would fade away. (93). Cheryl Strayed

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69) Cheryl Strayed

Very nice, " said Rick after a while. "Very nice, " he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. "What is?" I asked, turning to him, though I knew. "Everything, " he said. And it was true. Cheryl Strayed

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade. Cheryl Strayed

This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12, 000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing process. Cheryl Strayed

I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full... I didn't feel like a big fate idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too. Cheryl Strayed

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right. Cheryl Strayed

I'd never had a mind for math.... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story. Cheryl Strayed

It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve. Cheryl Strayed

He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life. Cheryl Strayed

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. Cheryl Strayed

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

.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade. Cheryl Strayed

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. . Cheryl Strayed

The sky didn't wonder where it was. Cheryl Strayed

Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night. Cheryl Strayed

He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again. Cheryl Strayed

As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true. Cheryl Strayed

But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn't have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world. They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment i was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9, 760 days that had come before them too. I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too. Cheryl Strayed

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch. Cheryl Strayed