Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

And try not to make a habit of getting engaged in the first place, Vivvie. It can leade to marriage if you're not careful.

Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.

The truth is, you need your fear, for obvious reasons of basic survival.

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 all couples have ever wanted, a little bit of privacy in which to practice all manners of love.

I happen to believe we are all walking repositories of buried treasure. I believe this is one of the oldest and most generous tricks the universe plays on us human beings, both for its own amusement and for ours: The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living.

The world was his divan. There was such a freedom in it.

Qualquer movimento é melhor do que a inércia, pois a inspiração sempre será atraída para o movimento.

I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say - no detail spared in the quest for perfection.

When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered a few feet off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.

If you don't learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you'll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.

the rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame.

It's a pity we cannot put an old head on young shoulders, or you could be wise, too. But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect—only if they happen to be talking about Judaism.

Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.

The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: "So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it's also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.

You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.

Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away...meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny." - Wayan

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere—wherever people are living out their lives. It's a city with a million centers. Somehow that was even more magical to know.

The Bat Phone to the Universe, some kind of Iva-only, open-round-the-clock special channel to the divine.

There are so many good reasons to stop complaining if you want to live a more creative life.

Worse, their relationship with their work is often emotionally violent. You want to make something? You are told to open up a vein and bleed. Time to edit your work? You are instructed to kill your darlings.

Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I've only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.