Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

You might get nothing out of it at all except a beautiful, long life where all you did was follow your gorgeous curiosity. And that should be enough too.

I am the planet's most affectionate life-form, something like the cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle.

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books.

the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry.

When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.

Life's metaphors are God's instructions.

I can honestly say [that writing] is the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

I've always considered myself lucky that I do not have many passions. There's only one pursuit that I have ever truly loved, and that pursuit is writing. This means, conveniently enough, that I never had to search for my destiny; I only had to obey it.

I push every day against forces that say you have to go faster, be more effective, be more productive, you have to constantly outdo yourself, you have to constantly outdo your neighbor - all of the stuff that creates an incredibly productive society, but also a very neurotic one.

Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I'm willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I'm willing to have more boring friends, who are sane.

Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?

I don't think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.

I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.

Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.

To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.

And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.

Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall,' which blew the top of my head straight off. I've read it three times, and I'm still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.

I wonder if I am capable of being somebody's sun, somebody's everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else's life?

I cannot overstate the power of libraries in my life.

I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life..what happened was that I started to pray.

I am determined to make the most of this life that I have, damn it - it's that kind of stubbornness I think we all need more of.

My whole life I've been an over-giver. My general operating policy has always been, 'If it belongs to me, don't worry: You can have it!'