“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
Elizabeth Gilbert“Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.”
Elizabeth Gilbert“I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage“The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage“The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage“Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage“ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change…”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage“I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love“You have no idea how strong my love is!”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love“Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying the only thing more impossible than stayin the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.g was leaving.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love