Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayedis an American memoirist, novelist, and essayist. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in national magazines and anthologies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 September 1968
CitySpangler, PA
CountryUnited States of America
writing artist doom-and-gloom
People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
way causes knows
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.
years grace age
You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
book literature remember
A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.
writing
Write like a motherfucker.
beautiful important ships
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.
tree pebbles branches
I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.
book writing forget
With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.
way yearning wanted
I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
mother strong stars
Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id 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.
woods way wilderness
The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
reading mentor december
I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, "Tenth of December." He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.
inspirational
How wild it was, to let it be.
writing figures edits
I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.