Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us.

Franza o Spagna, purchè se magna," which means, in dialect, "France or Spain, as long as I can eat.

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death

I work steadily, and I always thank the process. Whether

my work loves me as much as I love it—that it wants to play with me as much as I want to play with it—and that this source of love and play is boundless.

Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection). The arrogance of belonging pulls you out of the darkest depths of self-hatred—not by saying "I am the greatest!" but merely by saying "I am here!" I

There's a reason they call God a presence—because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

Groceries, baby, listen to your friend Richard. You go set your lily-white ass down in that meditation cave every day for the next three months and I promise you this--you're gonna start seeing some stuff that's so damn beautiful it'll make you wanna throw rocks at the Taj Mahal.

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy.

To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile.

I like you, kiddo, and once I like a person, I can only like them always. That's a rule of my life.

May I also urge you to forget about passion? Perhaps you are surprised to hear this from me, but I am somewhat against passion. Or at least, I am against the preaching of passion. I don't believe in telling people, "All you need to do is to follow your passion, and everything will be fine." I think this can be an unhelpful and even cruel suggestion at times.

I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one of my favorite possible things to be.

To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

curiosity is accessible to everyone. Passion can seem intimidatingly out of reach at times—a distant tower of flame, accessible only to geniuses and to those who are specially touched by God. But curiosity is a milder, quieter, more welcoming, and more democratic entity. The stakes of curiosity are also far lower than the stakes of passion.

I got letters saying, I detest everything about you, and I got letters saying, You have written my bible. Imagine if I'd tried to create a definition of myself based on any of these reactions. I didn't try. And

when I refer to "creative living," I am speaking more broadly. I'm talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

it seems to me that my fear and my creativity are basically conjoined twins—as evidenced by the fact that creativity cannot take a single step forward without fear marching right alongside it.

Hearing this announcement, your soul will mobilize accordingly. It will mobilize ecstatically, in fact, because this is what your soul was born for. (Trust me, your soul has been waiting for you to wake up to your own existence for years.) But

curiosity only ever asks one simple question: "Is there anything you're interested in?

It helped that Celia Ray could walk into a joint like nobody I've ever seen. She would throw her resplendence into a room ahead of her, the way a soldier might throw a grenade into a machine gunner's nest, and then she would follow her beauty right on in and assess the carnage.

that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-

If anything, I have come to believe that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me—waiting to see if I'm truly serious about this line of work.

The ability to respond is responsibility