Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

All lovers, even the most faithful lovers, are vulnerable to abandonment against their will. I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.

This is what I've found about life, as I've gotten older: you start to lose people, Angela. It's not that there is ever a shortage of people—oh, heavens no. It is merely that—as the years pass—there comes to be a terrible shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history.

I realize now that I always needed somebody to be infatuated with when I was twenty years old, and it didn't really matter who, apparently. Anybody with more charisma than me would do the trick. I was so unformulated as a human being, so unsteady in myself, that I was constantly grasping for attachment to another person - constantly anchoring myself to someone else's allure.

just might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom.

The other day in prayer I said to God, Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?.

I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own.

He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world. Most of all, though, he asked his students to be brave. Without bravery, he instructed, they would never be able to realize the vaulting scope of their own capacities. Without bravery, they would never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, their lives would remain small—far smaller than they probably wanted their lives to be.

I've spent so much time these last years wondering what I'm supposed to be. A wife? A lover? A celibate? An Italian? A glutton? A traveler? An artist? A Yogi? But I'm not any of these things, at least not completely. And I'm not Crazy Aunt Liz, either. I'm just a slippery antevasin - betwixt and between - a student on the ever-shifting border near the wonderful, scary forest of the new.

We all know that fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.

You made it; your get to put it out there. 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.

I have established a reputation for being someone who, if you tell her to do one thing, will almost certainly do the other. I also have a temper.

One can never know the state of another man's heart.

Chérie, je suis Brésilien du sud. Je peux passer dix ans avec le coeur brisé à cause d'une femme que je n'ai même pas embrassée.

É melhor viver o nosso próprio destino de forma imperfeita do que uma imitação da vida de outra pessoa na perfeição Bhagavad Gitav

As the psychologist Carol Gilligan has written, "Women's sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connection.

Todo comienza cuando el objeto de tu adoración te da una dosis embriagadora y alucinógena de algo que jamás te habías atrevido a admitir que necesitabas —un cóctel tóxico-sentimental, quizá, de un amor estrepitoso y un entusiasmo arrebatador—.

Good. I hope you're having a good time, too. People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they're wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it. So do the right thing

While it's lovely to be childlike in your pursuit of creativity, in other words, it's dangerous to be childish.

repeatedly give up their own health or their own time or their own best interests on behalf of what they perceive as the greater good—perhaps in order to consistently reinforce an imperative sense of specialness, of chosenness, of connection.

Not to mention that I have finally arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over the loss of one beautiful brown-eyed young man is indeed to promptly invite another one into her bed.

Because creative living is a path for the brave. We all know this. And we all know that when courage dies, creativity dies with it. We all know that fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.

But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

Sincere spiritual investigation is, and always has been, an endeavor of methodical discipline.

The child is taught form earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collet your soul and bring you to heaven.