Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be." This

not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby—I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to—I just don't care.

You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else's blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people's judgments about you are none of your business.

Defiende tus limitaciones y las harás tuyas

Be brave. Without bravery, you will never know the world as richly as it longs to be known.

If a cab would be kind enough to appear, I'll take it.

It is the custom of the young to be selfish... But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering--no matter what you think of them and their supposed good fortune.

Di la verdad, di la verdad, di la verdad».

You are a perfect snail: you carry your home on your back.

My friend Susan suggested that perhaps I should establish a not-for-profit relief organization called "Divorcées Without Borders.

Anyway, I quite liked the way he lived inside my imagination as a massive and powerful presence, built out of his poems and the stories I'd heard about him. So I decided to know him only that way—through my imagination. And that's where he remains for me to this day: still alive inside me, completely internalized, almost as though I dreamed him up.

Nothing pisses a control freak off more than life not going her way.

but she was old, and old women do tend to get pushed aside at big gatherings—even when they have footed the bill for that gathering.

You do not need anyone's permission to live a creative life

Oh, Jesus. How do you get out of this one? You don't. You can't get out of this one. Unless you're able to be honest, which of course I could not do.

Here, I pause to offer a prayer for my gentle reader: May you never, ever, have to get a divorce in New York.

The human mind, if dutifully trained, should be able to perform anything we ask of it. It is all just a matter of working hard.

What great harm depression and stress do to us….compression is what prematurely ages us---compacting us, physically and emotionally, into a feeling of frailty and brokenness. To fight against compression is to open up your life, to create possibility where once there was nothing, but pressure. What if your life belongs to you?

I am grateful to my mother, Carole Gilbert, for teaching me how to work my ass off and how to be resilient in the face of life's difficulties.

I am going to spend as much time as I can creating delightful things out of my existence, because that's what brings me awake and that's what brings me alive. I

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment.

a fight in the courts would be infinitely more expensive and time-consuming, not to mention soul-corroding.

When you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch – there's not a chance.