Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

Interesting outcomes, after all, are just awful outcomes with the volume of drama turned way down. I

U svijetu nereda, nesre?a i prijevare katkad je mogu?e vjerovati samo ljepoti. Samo je umjetni?ka izvrsnost nepotkupljiva. Užitku nije mogu?e spustiti cijenu. A obrok je katkad jedina stvarna valuta.

Q: What is creativity? A: The relationship between a human being and the mysteries of inspiration.

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an urban Thoreau) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...

Never apologize for it, never explain it away, never be ashamed of it. You did your best with what you knew, and you worked with what you had, in the time that you were given. You were invited, and you showed up, and you simply cannot do more than that.

We were so committed to solving this thing. Because how could two people so in love NOT end up happily ever after? It HAD to work. Didn't it?

I asked for so little!" she kept saying, as though her diminished demands alone should have protected her against any disappointments. But I think she was mistaken; she had actually asked for a lot. She had dared to ask for happiness, and she had dared to expect that happiness out of her marriage. You can't possibly ask for more than that.

Fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.

I had to do something about my longing, so I got up, went to the kitchen in my nightgown, peeled a pound of potatoes, boiled them up, sliced them, fried them in butter, salted them generously and ate every bite of them - asking my body the whole while if it would please accept the satisfaction of a pound of fried potatoes in lieu of the fulfillment of lovemaking. My body replied, only after eating every bite of food: No deal, babe.

The older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I'm far more moved by authenticity.

The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one's own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one's eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.

Anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later - again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly descend into a failed private hell.

And I do want to assure you: I'm aware that many things were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.

I can only assume that she was like all of us—a complicated being, composed of more than one man's impressions.

He didn't quit his day job to follow his dream; he just folded his dream into his everyday life.

Better a trickster than a martyr be. What's the difference between a martyr and a trickster, you ask? Here's a quick primer. Martyr energy is dark, solemn, macho, hierarchical, fundamentalist, austere, unforgiving, and profoundly rigid. Trickster energy is light, sly, transgender, transgressive, animist, seditious, primal, and endlessly shape-shifting.

If you tell me slowly, I can understand quickly.

I held on to those other sources of income for so long because I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life.

Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you

There's no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence.

I cannot unshackle myself from argument, Ambrose. Recall that I am Henry Whittaker's daughter. I was born into argument. Argument was my first nursemaid. Argument is my lifelong bedfellow. What's more, I believe in argument and I even love it. Argument is our most steadfast pathway toward truth, for it is the only proven arbalest against superstitious thinking, or lackadaisical axioms.

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

Divine Time, Geological Time, Human Time, Moss Time.

Your ego is a wonderful servant, but it's a terrible master—because the only thing your ego ever wants is reward, reward, and more reward. And