Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

She felt the familiar old constriction in her chest - that combination of desire and urgency. She needed more hours - many more hours - if she was ever to study these questions as they deserved to be studied. She would never have enough hours. She had already lost so much time this week. Every soul in the world seemed to believe that Alma's hours belonged to him. How was she ever meant to devote herself to proper scientific exploration?

We're all related, after all, so there's going to be some repetition of creative instinct. Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours.

For a group of nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante's Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare.

But maybe that's where love grows best -- in the deep space that exists between polarities.

Everything sucks, some of the time." You just have to decide what sort of suckage you're willing to deal with.

It has been so hard for me to imagine living a life without him in it. Even just to imagine that there will never be another road trip with my favourite travelling companion.

You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.

I realized as a songwriter that all I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds.

that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.

I'll tell you something about your uncle, Vivian. Billy Buell is that rare man who claims to love women and actually does.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don't need to follow it, no matter what they say.

It's not difficult to compliment people in order to try to win their affections. What is difficult is to do it in the right way.

When I don't know what I'm doing, I look like I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a transparent transmitter of my every thought.

Your ego is a wonderful servant, but it's a terrible master—because the only thing your ego ever wants is reward, reward, and more reward.

Si la fe fuese racional, no sería fe. La fe es la creencia en lo que no se puede ver ni tocar. La fe es caminar —de frente y a toda velocidad— hacia las tinieblas. Si realmente tuviéramos todas las respuestas en cuanto al significado de la vida y la naturaleza de Dios y el destino del alma, la religión no sería un acto de fe ni un valiente acto de humanidad; sería simplemente... una prudente póliza de seguros.

But let me explain my culture of origin to you, Angela, in case you have never been around White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. You need to understand that we have only one central rule of engagement, and here it is: This matter must never be spoken of again. We WASPS can apply this rule to anything -- from a moment of awkwardness at the dinner table to a relative's suicide. Asking no further questions is the song of my people.

Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only

why' is a hard question to answer in any language

You have to believe that what you are creating is sacred.

old. I had been trained to believe that a woman was supposed to have children by her mid-thirties—or at least that she was supposed to want them. And if you didn't follow that path, what kind of woman were you? Desiccated, tired, useless. Sexless. A spinster. A hag. An old bag. An old maid. Old.

It's all just an instinct and an experiment and a mystery, so begin. Begin anywhere. Preferably right now.

Of course God already knows what I need. The question is - do I know?

I was a sensitive and easily traumatized creature who would fall into fits of weeping at any disturbance in her force field.