Elizabeth Gilbert
67 quotes
Biography
Elizabeth Gilbert is an American journalist and author. Her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages.
"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."
"You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be."
"You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your 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."
"When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings."
"There were times, especially when I was traveling for 'Eat, Pray, Love,' when, I swear to God, I would feel this weight of my female ancestors, all those Swedish farmwives from beyond the grave who were like, 'Go! Go to Naples! Eat more pizza! Go to India, ride an elephant! Do it! Swim in the Indian Ocean. Read those books. Learn a language.'"
"To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous."
"To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balancedlife."
"Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."
"The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."
"Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing..."
"In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place."
"The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving."
"Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water."
"It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away."
"I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises."
"I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?"
"The love that moves the sun and the other stars."
"You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."
"I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water."
"You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."
"You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words."
"Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope"
"Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy."
"Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury."
"Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."