Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

It's all for the best, I know it is. I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises. I know all this. But still…

That's right I was speaking to the creator of universe as though we had just been introduced at a cocktail party.

double-pumpin' it when you have to inhale two desperate gasps of oxygen with every sob.

Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That

To know God, you need only to renounce one thing—your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.

But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that's why honor is a painful field.

I thought my aunt was terrific. She had paid attention to me as a person, not a child, and that means everything to an eleven-year-old child who does not want to be seen as a child.

We must risk delight," he wrote. "We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

Artists, by nature, are gamblers. Gambling is a dangerous habit. But whenever you make art, you're always gambling. You're rolling the dice on the slim odds that your investment of time, energy, and resources now might pay off later in a big way—that somebody might buy your work, and that you might become successful.

The Balinese don't wait and see how things go. That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.

You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment.

the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest.

benevolent throne set someplace high up on the moon.

Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged.

Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This

Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it.

Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.

because in the end, creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience

The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me.

If you do say yes to an idea, now it's showtime.

the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?

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.

I hope that your heart is strong within your grieving.

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design.