Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.

Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.

You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.

I've come to realize that the contemporary creative culture is not generating the best possible outcome.

I don't think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.

Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it's also a political and economic contract of the highest order.

Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.

I saw the apartment almost as a sanatorium, a hospice clinic for my own recovery. I painted the walls in the warmest colors I could find and bought myself flowers every week, as if I were visiting myself in the hospital.

Bhuta ia, dewa ia. (Bali expression meaning Man is a demon, man is a god.).

I wonder if I am capable of being somebody's sun, somebody's everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else's life?

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later--again, for its own mysterious reasons.

Our relationship now thoroughly ruined, with even civility destroyed between us, all I wanted anymore was the door.

For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.

Nothing is less efficient than perfectionism.

I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

I'm still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think that disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.

The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.

Don't rush through the experiences and circumstances that have the most capacity to transform you.

It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.

Women are capable of enduring a tremendous amount of disappointment and still have a good life.

If we never leave our house except to drive to work, do we need to be even remotely aware of this powerful, humbling, extraordinary and eternal life force that surges and ebbs around us all the time? Apparently not. Because we have stopped paying attention.

Everybody imitates before they can innovate.

Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance in Bali ( an island, don't forget, with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it-you would pray, too).

Life's metaphors are God's instructions.

As the saying goes, Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them. Why would I want to keep my limitations?

I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.

Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.

You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

The Balinese don't wait and see how things go. That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.

I think another way that you can really harm yourself as an artist is by buying into the mythology that it's really important.

Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God.

I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life..what happened was that I started to pray.

There are always two figures in a marriage, two votes, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations.

He was powerful and I died of love in his shadow.

The number 108 is held to be the most auspicious, a perfect three-digit multiple of three, its components adding up to 9, which is three threes. And 3, of course, is the number representing supreme balance.

That's just ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what your ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you're flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one.

What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail? What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant? What do you love even more than you love your own ego? How fierce is your trust in that love?

Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.

There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.

Men go into marriage with virtually no expectations whatsoever. Ten years later, the men are delightfully surprised to find out that it's actually kind of nice, and the women have sort of had to take a nose dive from what they thought it was going to be.

We're already separated that's official but there's still a window of hope left open that perhaps someday we could give things another try.

You're wishin' too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.

Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there's no reason to add to everyone's misery by looking miserable yourself.

I see a lot of women who can't travel when they're young, and then their kids grow up and they become amazing adventurers. Travel is not only for the young. Sometimes it's wasted on the young.

The appreciation of pleasure can be the anchor of humanity.

The world needs women who stop asking for permission from the principal. Permission to live their lives as they deeply know they often should. I think we still look to authority figures for validation, recognition, permission.

I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what i want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.

Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can't be replaced by anything else.

Creativity is a gift to the creator not just a gift to the audience.

If you're alive, you're a creative person.

I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.

Dolce far niente: the pleasure of doing anything.

I feel like if I were to get another tattoo, it would probably be those two words. Just stubborn, stubborn, stubborn gladness.

Whenever I would feel such happiness my guilt alarm went off.

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful magic skills that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.

I actually have a great deal of respect for antidepressants; I think they can be enormously mighty tools toward recovery.

Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it.

There is a quiet glory in merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations.

I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.

You can butcher the sheep only once. But if you are careful, you can shear the sheep every year.

Oh, cold world -- I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms.

The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.

Dear me, how I love a library.

The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate, and teach your heart that this is destiny.

In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work.

The only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer.

Marriage is a strange combination of dream and reality, and we spend our lives as couples trying to negotiate that divide.

I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.

My life acccomplishments? Sanity, and you.

God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn't it?

Marriage is -- among other things -- a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love.