Two Women Walk into a Bar Quotes

“Intellectually, I knew her criticisms of my body said more about her than they did about me; I knew they reflected the wider cultural values we’d both been steeped in all our lives that equated thinness with female beauty and, indeed, value. But they cut me to the core anyway. They heightened my sense of loss and longing for my mom, which was particularly acute in the years when I was becoming a mother myself. She would’ve said I was beautiful. She would’ve commiserated and assured me I was doing great. She would’ve told me everything was going to be okay, regardless of my weight. She would’ve been everything that Joan was not.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“Over the previous two decades, we’d come to love each other, but it was a particular, conditional sort of love, one based on circumstance and courtesy rather than connection and compatibility.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“Her desire to avoid speaking honestly about complicated feelings was equal to my desire to do the opposite. In the twenty years since we’d met, I’d tried to thwart her evading any discussion of what she called “depressing things,” but seldom had I managed. Her determination to stay on the surface was so powerful that it had come to feel like my preference too. It was almost as if, in her presence, I stepped into a force field that quelled my every impulse to dig and say and reveal.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“Joan had never been a hands-on grandparent, but she was the only one they ever knew,”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“There is no greater love than that between a mother and son,” Joan had once said to me in a grand and grave tone,”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“It had been more than twenty years since she’d walked into that bar and I’d picked her last. She’d been alive in my life for nearly as long as my mother had. She was my family, my ancestor, no matter our distance or difficulties or disappointments, the truth of that finally crackling between us.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“To describe Joan was to tell a story that began with a lie.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“Filmmaking never seemed to her like a real job, the sort where you show up at a certain place at a certain time most days of the week, the sort she could explain to her friends in a sentence. At the premiere of one of his documentaries, as Joan and I sat among an audience applauding Brian onstage, she leaned over to me and said, “What he should’ve done is gotten a teaching license.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“There is no greater love than that between a mother and son,” Joan had once said to me in a grand and grave tone, and it had rankled me so profoundly that I had to keep tears from coming into my eyes. Not because it seemed to place the bond between them above the bond that Brian and I shared, but because it placed it above the love I had for my mother.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“though we often joked that his mother loved but didn’t like him.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“Intellectually, I knew her criticisms of my body said more about her than they did about me; I knew they reflected the wider cultural values we’d both been steeped in all our lives that equated thinness with female beauty and, indeed, value.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“Her determination to stay on the surface was so powerful that it had come to feel like my preference too. It was almost as if, in her presence, I stepped into a force field that quelled my every impulse to dig and say and reveal.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar

“But there’s a spiritual component to dying. To some degree, people need to release whatever’s holding them here before they can make the transition.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar