Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

When you insist on your limitations, you are stuck with them.

since when did creativity become a suffering contest?

Just write anything and put it out there with reckless abandon.

YOU'RE HAVING A DELIGHTFUL PICNIC, THEN SUDDENLY THERE'S A TORNADO. THE BAROMETRIC PRESSURE DROPS. THE SKY GOES BLACK. THE BIRDS GO SILENT. THIS THING IS COMING STRAIGHT FOR YOU

What are you willing to give up to live the life you are pretending you want?

Thank heavens we have an earth! Otherwise, where would we sit?" Retta

Over the course of the summer, he taught the children to eat foods they had never known, to sharpen and use knives, to carve their own spoons, to make knots and play Indian games and- every time they cut a branch off a living tree- to cut away a small lock of their own hair, to leave as an offering of thanks.

We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we're so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don't give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won't be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.

gallimaufry of ices and trifles and toasts, supervised

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.") I would so much rather that you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me. Or if your subject matter is darker and more serious, I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself, or to relieve yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.

These were risks I was willing to take. It was more important for me to feel free than safe.

People convince themselves that they have been robbed when they have not, in fact, been robbed. Such thinking comes from a wretched allegiance to the notion of scarcity—from the belief that the world is a place of dearth, and that there will never be enough of anything to go around. The motto of this mentality is: Somebody else got mine.

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. I knew better than to ask this of my writing, because over the years, I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.

La palabra gurú se compone de dos sílabas sánscritas. La primera significa «oscuridad»; la segunda significa «luz». Es decir, el paso de la oscuridad a la luz.

I work steadily, and I always thank the process.

I shall tell you this: the whole sphere of air that surrounds us, Alma, is alive with invisible attractions—electric, magnetic, fiery and thoughtful. There is a universal sympathy all around us. There is a hidden means of knowing.

You must learn to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Someone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there's no war, and then there's another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person--and where's the good in that?

He had learned in the past four years to speak only when he knew that which he was speaking about. Moreover, he had learned that silence can sometimes relax a listener into thinking that one might be intelligent.

apreciar o prazer pode ser a âncora de humanidade de uma pessoa.

your fear will always show up—especially when you're trying to be inventive or innovative. 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.

I asked one Sicilian if those buildings were made of cheap concrete and he said, Oh, no -this is very expensive concrete. In each batch, there are a few bodies of people who were killed by the Mafia, and that costs money. But it does make the concrete stronger to be reinforced with all those bones and teeth.

Once you introduce truth into a room, the room may never be the same again.

What's the alternative? Yo quit whenever something gets challenging? To futz around your whole life, miserable and incomplete?

Pliny the Elder wrote once: "If anyone will consider the abundance of Rome's public supply of water, for baths, cisterns, ditches, houses, gardens, villas; and take into account the distance over which it travels, the arches reared, the mountains pierced, the valleys spanned—he will admit that there never was anything more marvelous in the whole world.