Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

We need you to reveal to us what you know, what you have learned, what you have seen and felt. If you are older, chances are strong that you may already possess absolutely everything you need to possess in order to live a more creative life - except the confidence to actually do your work. But we need you to do your work. Whether you are young or old, we need your work in order to enrich and inform our own lives.

Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.

You can start wherever you decide to start.

I especially loved to walk around at night and catch glimpses through windows of strangers living their lives. So many different dinnertimes, so many different work hours. Everyone was different ages, different races. Some people were resting, some laboring, some all alone, some celebrating in boisterous company. I never tired of moving through these scenes. I relished the sensation of being one small dot of humanity in a larger ocean of souls.

any motion whatsoever beats inertia, because inspiration will always be drawn to motion.

It's all for the best.

I would sit with him until he was all right again. I knew that I would sit with him for as long as it took. That's all I could do. That was my only job in the world that day - to sit with a good man. To watch over him from the other side...until he was steadied.

The poet David Whyte calls this sense of creative entitlement "the arrogance of belonging," and claims that it is an absolutely vital privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life.

Ah, lovely adolescence—when the "talented" are officially shunted off from the herd, thus putting the total burden of society's creative dreams on the thin shoulders of a few select souls, while condemning everyone else to live a more commonplace, inspiration-free existence! What a system . . . )

The former Catholic nun (who oughtta know about guilt, after all) wouldn't hear of it. "Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Lastly, remember what W. C. Fields had to say on this point: "It ain't what they call you; it's what you answer to.

She stopped feeling like she was nothing more than a consumer, nothing more than the sum of her daily obligations and duties. She was making something

The paradox that you need to comfortably inhabit, if you wish to live a contented creative life, goes something like this: "My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely)." Sometimes

If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him.

We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we're so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don't give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won't be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow." They

I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work — one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.

Everyone should leave the table feeling as if they've gotten a bad deal," my father once taught me joylessly. "This way, you may rest assured that nobody was taken for a ride, and that nobody can get too far ahead.

In ancient Greek, the word for the highest degree of human happiness is eudaimonia, which basically means "well-daemoned"—that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide.

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 predictable of calamities.

Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself.

A creative life is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

Having money saved is not quite the same thing as having a plan, mind you—but it does start to make a girl feel as though a plan could someday be possible.

Rest assured, dear friend, that many noteworthy and great sciences and arts have been discovered through the understanding and subtlety of women, both in cognitive speculation, demonstrated in writing, and in the arts, manifested in manual works of labor. I will give you plenty of examples. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies 1405

God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed—much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts.