Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person...Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.

I don't want to be afraid of bright colors, or new sounds, or big love, or risky decisions, or strange experiences, or weird endeavors, or sudden changes, or even failure.

I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear.

Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby.

No, when I refer to "creative living," I am speaking more broadly. I'm talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

Speak to your darkest and most negative interior voices the way a hostage negotiator speaks to a violent psychopath: calmly, but firmly. Most of all, never back down. You cannot afford to back down. The life you are negotiating to save, after all, is your own.

Those girls are on the road to trouble," I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk—and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn't understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted. Oh, our youthful needs! Oh, the deliciously blinding yearnings of the young—which inevitably take us right to the edges of cliffs, or trap us in cul-de-sacs of our design.

Where there is life, George, there is hope. Death is so terribly final. It will come soon enough to us all. I would hesitate to wish it hastened upon anyone.

The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.

The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.

He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel

I'm so excited about school. I'm such a shameless student. I laid my clothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my patent leather shoes and my new lunch box. I hope the teacher will like me :)

Keep cultivating gratitude.

When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward.

First spouses, I have learned, don't ever really go away--even if you aren't speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism.

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

We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we'll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there's no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don't at least marginally understand our home.

debt will always be the abattoir of creative dreams.

Your art not only doesn't have to be original, in other words; it also doesn't have to be important.

Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection).

Not making a living,' he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, 'just living.

Go back to bed so that, when the tempest comes, you'll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon. But not tonight.

She was paying me the compliment of her undivided attention, and thus I was instantly smitten.

Never explain yourself, Alma. It makes you appear weak.