If a situation requires swearing to God it is – by definition – extreme.
Find yourself a place in the universe,′ she said, ’a place where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet. Take the right picture and a man will walk into it. If you can bear him even a little, then for a while let him stay.
I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.
Dogs change lives. Half Buddha, half Bozo, they keep us tethered to the earth, and teach us to fly. Our dogs are our sanity keepers.
I’ve been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there’s a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don’t think i will ever shake.
When a book is in its final stages, I’ve just got to be home, looking at it seventeen hours a day, and that’s fine. But all that initial creation of the early drafts, I’d just as soon write it on the road in any extreme place. That’s sort of ideal.
Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.
People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me.
I’ve always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings...
I always think, when I’m in motion, writing seems like the most natural thing.
Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.
The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn’t be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn’t yet shown up.