Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

La decepción es la ira de los débiles.

You can certainly live without the debt, because debt will always be the abattoir of creative dreams.

Eventually I may have to become a more solid citizen again, I'm aware of this. But not yet.... Please. Not just yet.

None of it was ever easy, but that wasn't the point. I had never asked writing to be easy; I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me.

And always remember that people's judgements about you are none of your business.

I recently read a fabulous blog by a writer named Mark Manson, who said that the secret to finding your purpose in life is to answer this question in total honesty: What's your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?

The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

So I don't try to kill off my fear. I don't go to war against it. Instead, I make all that space for it. Heaps of space. Every single day. I'm making space for fear right this moment. I allow my fear to live and breathe and stretch out its legs comfortably. It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too.

itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week, so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics. I came to cherish his face precisely because it was his. Even his burn scars became beautiful to my eye.

For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself.

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake... they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it.

When we are young, Angela, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right—not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either.

She was making something of herself, making something with herself.

My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. 'I think that kind of faith is so beautiful,' she whispers to me in the church, 'but I can't do it, I just can't...

It makes me satisfied, Frank," I finally replied. "It's like this: I believe I have a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It's always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men—it satisfies that darkness.

Bless his heart, Giovanni doesn't try to put a reassuring arm around me, nor does he express the slightest discomfort about my explosion of sadness. Instead, he just sits through my tears in silence, until I've calmed down.

By unnerving definition, 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.

Quit your complaining. It's not the world's fault that you wanted to be an artist. It's not the world's job to enjoy the films you make, and it's certainly not the world's obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you must, but stop whining and get back to work.

And now I'm kissing my robes." He lifted a corner of his saffron robes and gave a loud smack. Thinking this was probably some super-arcane religious custom, I asked what he was doing. He said, "Same thing I always do whenever anyone comes to me for relationship advice. I'm just thanking God I'm a monk and I don't have to deal with this stuff anymore.

I'm not a virgin, Jim," I repeated—as though the problem had been that he hadn't heard me correctly the first time. He sat up and stared ahead for a long time, collecting himself. Quietly, I put my shirt back on. This is not the sort of conversation that you want to be having while your boobs are hanging out.

History has a pulse, they say- but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when its drumming in my goddamn ears.

Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana . . .

But if you're working on your craft every day on your own, with steady discipline and love, then you are already for real as a creator, and you don't need to pay anybody to affirm that for you.

He was lost in the cult of artistic suffering, but he called that suffering by another name: dedication.