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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote speaks to the duality of experiences in life, particularly how grief can lead to both destruction and the creation of new understandings.
Cheryl Strayed's quote explores the complex nature of grief, illustrating how deep sorrow can encompass both loss and the potential for growth. It highlights the idea that within the depths of grief, we can find contrasting elements such as darkness and light, desolation and sustenance. The 'obliterated place' symbolizes the emotional landscape we navigate through when coping with profound grief, where our pain can also serve as a foundation for healing and rebuilding a sense of home within ourselves.
Themes
GriefCreationDestructionHealingLife
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a speech about overcoming loss can inspire others.
More from Cheryl Strayed
All quotes →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
The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write.
Cheryl StrayedRead
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