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.
Cheryl StrayedRead
Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Focus on your journey and creativity instead of worrying about the outcome of your career.
Cheryl Strayed emphasizes the importance of the process of writing and living authentically, rather than fixating on the destination or external measures of success. This quote encourages individuals, especially writers, to embrace their craft and remain dedicated to their work without becoming discouraged by uncertainty or self-doubt.
Themes
CareerLifeWritingFaithAuthenticity
In practice
Example use cases
During a workshop, I encouraged aspiring authors to embrace Strayed's message for motivation.
More from Cheryl Strayed
All quotes →The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
Cheryl StrayedRead
I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
Cheryl StrayedRead
There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.
Cheryl StrayedRead
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 StrayedRead
Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
Cheryl StrayedRead
Similar quotes
To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
Bruce ChatwinRead
I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?
Ernest HemingwayRead
Ya know, right now the most important thing in my life is to make sure you understand that, first of all I thank God I'm alive today, and I mean that. I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing.
Stevie Ray VaughanRead
You ain't got but one life. You ought to live it the way you want.
Samuel L. JacksonRead
It is a pink and blue feeling, as sharp as clear sky; a slight breeze, and the edges of Lake Nakuru would rise like the ruffle at the edge of a skirt; and I am pockmarked with whole-body pinpricks of potentiality. A stretch of my body would surely stretch as far as the sky. The whole universe poised, and I am the agent of any movement.
Binyavanga WainainaRead
Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths
Kay Redfield JamisonRead