Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

The fact that I get to spend my life making objectively useless things means that I don't live in a postapocalyptic dystopia. It means I am not exclusively chained to the grind of mere survival. It means we still have enough space left in our civilization for the luxuries of imagination and beauty and emotion—and even total frivolousness.

Do I have the right to experience pleasure and peace? If so, what would bring me pleasure and peace?

And I hate to disappoint you, but it's best you learn now: most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.

He possessed a more pristine sense of artistic discernment, was the implication. Exposure to imperfections—even his own—injured his soul. He felt there was nobility in his choice never to write a book, if it could not be a great book.

We humans come into this world - as Aristophanes so beautifully explained - feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find somebody who will recognize us and repair us. (Or re-pair us.)

She knew this to be true. Maybe not tonight, but some night soon. She was not afraid of death, in theory. If anything, she had nothing but respect and reverence for the Genius of Death, who had shaped this world more than any other force. That said, she did not wish to die quite this moment. She still wanted to see what would happen next, as much as ever. The thing was to resist submersion for as long as possible.

The Bhagavad Gita--the ancient Indian yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

People don't do this kind of thing because they have all kinds of extra time and energy for it; they do this kind of thing because their creativity matters to them enough that they are willing to make all kinds of extra sacrifices for it.

Here is what I do know, however: sins of the flesh will not get you punished in the afterlife. They will only get you punished in this life. As you've now learned.

There are songs, Waits says, that simply will not allow themselves to be born, and that will hold up the recording of an entire album.

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day? Of

You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others -- why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion...All I ever wanted was to know *this* world.

Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness.

He noticed that his children felt fully entitled to make up songs all the time, and when they were done with them, they would toss them out "like little origami things, or paper airplanes.

Those girls are on the road to trouble, I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk - and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn't understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted.

There's a reason the 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.

But through watching his children create so freely, Waits had an epiphany: It wasn't actually that big a deal. He told me, "I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds." Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That's all it is. That realization, Waits said, seemed to open things up for him. Songwriting became less painful after that.

And what are your duties at the theater?" "To catch things that are falling through midair, right before they hit the ground and shatter.

The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.

Maybe this is a hallmark of privilege: certain well-bred young ladies simply cannot conceive of the possibility that somebody will not be along shortly to rescue them.

inspiration will always try its best to work with you—but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.

Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing.

Give him a trophy for it, but don't marry a man just because he's nice. And try not to make a habit of getting engaged in the first place, Vivvie. It can lead to marriage if you're not careful.

The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence becomes.