In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it’s a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning the possibility of rescue.
— Steve Almond from the Introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
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.
Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity.
–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
You might, for example, be interested to know that the word “prestigious” is derived from the Latin praestigiae, which means “conjuror’s tricks.” Isn’t that interesting? This word that we use to mean honorable and esteemed has its beginnings in a word that has everything to do with illusion, deception, and trickery.</
–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
I talk to Mr. Sugar and my friends. I make lists. I attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my “best self”—the one that’s generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, bighearted, and grateful. I think really hard about what I’ll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain. I move toward the light, even if it’s a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.
–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.
–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Bewildered Creatures 