Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.
I’m not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth.
There was something about the prairie for me – it wasn’t where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn’t ever stop living under that big sky.
It’s September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.
The Universe has a plan to make sure we don’t ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts.
I’m always out looking for weird, beautiful things.
I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.
Stillness is a harder concept for me than ecstasy, but I can imagine it best when I am fully present and paying strict attention to a place I am moving through.
Being in the presence of the “other” seems to show me who I am in a way that is really important to me. I feel radically more comfortable in Laos, say, than I do in Pennsylvania.
I’m about going out in the world and noticing stuff, and going home and writing it down, and putting it next to other stuff I’ve noticed and seeing what happens.
For me, the shaping of the story is more important than accuracy.
One thing I’m always thinking about myself is what am I willing to make up? And the answer is not much.
Movement helps keep me centered. I am a disaster, for instance, at sitting meditation, but I’m pretty decent at walking meditation.
Give me a labyrinth to walk and I can usually free my mind.
I write well on the road. I have the energy, I have the motivation to write. I’m happy when I’m on the road.
It would have been so perfectly ironic if I had been killed by the dog, because I was petting a dog who was not used to being pet, because I think I’m some kind of dog whisperer, and I think I can make any dog love me.
I write really well on the road.
My parents were travelers. Every time my parents got ten dollars ahead they went somewhere. That’s what they did. So I got the bug from them.
Sometimes I’m writing for magazines on assignment, but the university has to be patient with me. I mean, during the ten-week periods that I have a class, I’m there every Thursday night or whatever it is, but sometimes that’s all I’m there, because I’m somewhere else the rest of the time.
Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.