“You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Because I know something that you don't know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you'll move past it and you'll be fine. And helping somebody likej you through the worst experience of her life is incredibly gratifying.”
“Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution).”
“Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. (From Ketut Liyer, the Balinese healer)”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
“A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“But I don't know how much more socializing I can do, Felipe. I only have the one dress. People will start to notice that I'm wearing the same thing all the time." "You're young and beautiful, darling. You only need the one dress”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible to experience it now.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“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.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“meditation vs prayer = listening vs talking”
“As for discipline—it's important, but sort of overrated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.”
“The day is ending. It's time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, Let go.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses--one foot is on the horse called "fate," the other on the horse called "free will." And the question you have to ask every day is--which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. My mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
“Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predicatable of calamities.”
Source: Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage
“I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.”
Source: Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage
“There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The universe will shift, destiny's molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“I remember asking myself one night, while I was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts, 'Is there ANYTHING about this scene you can change, Liz?' And all I could think to do was stand up, whle still sobbing, and try to balance on one foot in the middle of the living room. Just to prove that - while I couldn't stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue - I was not yet totally out of control: at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Oh, cold world -- I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.”
Source: Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage
“Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“There are always two figures in a marriage, two votes, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations.”
“We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Our relationship now thoroughly ruined, with even civility destroyed between us, all I wanted anymore was the door.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.”
“It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.”
Source: Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage
“What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“There's a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, "Let me take care of you forever," and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I'd given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Problem is, you can’t accept that his relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby – you’re just lickin’ at the empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.” “But I love him.” “So love him.” “But I miss him.” “So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“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.”
“In every possible instance Saint Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves to contain their carnal yearnings to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven. "But if they cannot contain " Paul finally conceded then "let them marry for it is better to marry than to burn." Which is perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history.”
“A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“too many maniacs not enough michelangelos”
“I would say that if you really want to STOP knowing someone, you have to divorce him.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Desperate love is always the toughest way to do it.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“I want to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Il bel far niente means 'the beauty of doing nothing'... [it] has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either.”
Source: Eat Pray Love 10th-Anniversary Edition: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
“Soon you start craving that intense attention with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld you probably turn sick, crazy and depleted not to mention resentful of the dealer who encourage this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore despite that you know that he has it hidden somewhere God dammit because you know that he used to give it to you for free.”
“It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.”
Source: Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage
