Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. (Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes)
“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you is a fine art, in and of itself.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“A majority of the time, jewelry is an attempt to cover up a badly chosen or ill-fitting garment.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“A man can’t help where he’s born. A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don’t make ’em biscuits.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Stern Men
“A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“A writer’s life was easier than an actor’s life. Writers get to set their own hours, they aren’t at the mercy of an audience, and there’s no director telling them what to do. ”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Admit what you did. Take your lumps. The sooner you get flattened to the ground, the sooner you can begin to rebuild your life again. That’s always been my experience, anyway. Take it from an old pro.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“After a certain age, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you’re always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life – collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Anyway, at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“As any New Yorker can tell you, you will eventually run into everyone on the sidewalks of this city. For that reason, New York is a terrible town in which to have an enemy.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“As for things that could not be changed, they must stoically be endured.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Stern Men
“As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff of it is bad for you.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he’s a Navy SEAL: He hasn’t slept in days, he’s all hopped up on Red Bull, and he’s liable to shoot at his own shadow in an absurd effort to keep everyone “safe.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Bullshit is a word that has been more emotionally incorporated into Balinese than almost any other in the English language. It’s one of the very worst things you can call someone in Bali – “a bullshit.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart. The rest of it will take care of itself.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that merely by being here you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.” (Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes)
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Critics cannot make someone a star. Box-office receipts cannot make someone a star. Mere excellence cannot make someone a star. What makes someone a star is when the people decide to love you en masse. When people are willing to line up at the stage door for hours after a show just to catch a glimpse – that makes you a star.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Dance until you collapse, and then keep dancing for a little bit longer after that.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“Do not let your ego totally run the show, or it will shut down the show. 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. And since there’s never enough reward to satisfy, your ego will always be disappointed. Left unmanaged, that kind of disappointment will rot you from the inside out.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that – whatever the outcome – you have traveled a noble path.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart. The rest of it will take care of itself.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers to.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Don’t marry a man just because he’s nice. And try not to make a habit of getting engaged in the first place. It can lead to marriage if you’re not careful.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life’s greatest secret pleasures.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Everybody imitates before they can innovate.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Falling apart is something that all pretty young girls seem to know how to do instinctively – and they do it because it works. It works for the same reason that an octopus is able to escape in a cloud of ink: because tears provide a distracting screen. Buckets of tears can divert difficult conversations and alter the flow of natural consequences. The reason for this is that most people (men especially) hate to see a pretty young girl crying, and they will automatically rush to comfort her – forgetting what they were talking about only a moment before. At the very least, a thick showering of tears can create a pause – and in that pause, a pretty young girl can buy herself some time.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“Having money saved is not quite the same thing as having a plan, mind you – but it does start to make a girl feel as though a plan could someday be possible.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don’t talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you’re doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better everyday.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“Here is the thing about drinking: one can always drink more, if one is truly committed. It’s just a matter of discipline, really.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I always hated hearing old people yammering on like this when I was young. And I do what to assure you: I’m aware that many thing were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’ the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“I believe a dress should flatter not only a woman’s figure, but also her intelligence.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us – albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“I don’t like New York. It’s a city full of second-place winners.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“I hate to disappoint you, but it’s best you learn now: most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I have dedicated my entire life to the pursuit of creativity, and I spend a lot of time encouraging other people to do the same, because I think a creative life is the most marvelous life there is.” (Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes)
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more that I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I’ve overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“I like you, kiddo, and once I like a person, I can only like them always. That’s a rule of my life.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I love married women. You know that. Ideally, happily married ones. A happily married woman is the most solid friend a man could ever have.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I only meant that there was a place within my imagination so fathomlessly deep that the light of the real world could never touch it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I quickly discovered that three people engaging in sexual exploits at the same time can be both a problematic and arduous situation. One never quite knows where to put one’s attention, you see. There are so many limbs to organize! There can be a great deal of: Oh, pardon me, I didn’t see you there. And just when you’re getting settled into something nice, somebody new shows up to interrupt you. One also never quite knows when it is over. Just when you think you’re done with your pleasure, you find that somebody out there isn’t yet done with theirs, and back you go, into the fray.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I still wasn’t a real New Yorker, you see. I was still a tourist. You don’t become a real New Yorker until you can manage the city alone.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more that a deep existential angst the says, again and again, ‘I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“I was not one for telling the truth back then. Truth telling was not my first instinct in any situation – especially in stressful situations. It took me many years to become an honest person, and I know why: because the truth is often terrifying. Once you introduce truth into a room, the room may never be the same again.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“I’m a newsman. If it’s true or interesting, I got no choice but to publish it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet to come surprises.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“I’m sorry for many of the things I’ve done, too. Everyone is sorry. It’s good to be sorry – but don’t make a fetish of it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“If I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“If you clear out all of that space in your mind you would have a doorway.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“If you know anything about the friendships of young girls, you will know that there is always one person playing the part of the handmaiden.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“If you take on this commitment, at the very least, we expect you to see it through. One cannot afford in life to do less than one promises.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“In all of our lives, there are days that we wish we could see expunged from the record of our very existence.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“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
Eat, Pray, Love
“In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all. After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain – yet somehow, still, we carry on.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“In this shallow world a pretty face means everything.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it’s more like love’s shady second cousin who’s always borrowing money and can’t hold down a job.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“It ain’t what they call you; it’s what you answer to.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“It might have been done before, but it hasn’t been done by you!”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“It used to be that god was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“It was the Senator’s opinion that a good, peppery chicken soup could cure anything, even childbirth, so he cooked up a nice batch for Stanley Thomas’s wife.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Stern Men
“It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“It’s easy to be wise after the event. But what’s the use of being twenty years old, if not to make gross errors?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“It’s not a ludicrous hypothesis to say that the Balinese are the global masters of balance, the people for whom the maintenance of perfect equilibrium is an art, a science and a religion.” (Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes)
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“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.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“It’s so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it’s been polluted.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Life goes on, after all, and one must always seek the lesson even through the sorrow. Never remain static; never stop collecting information.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“Life is both dangerous and fleeting, and thus there is no point in denying yourself pleasure or adventure while you are here.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Love renders all of our plans and all of our hopes a gamble”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Manhattan is an island. People forget that. Walk far enough in any direction, and you’ll run into water. If you hit a river, turn around and go in the other direction. You’ll learn your way around. Dumber people than you have figured out this city.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Most individuals have never had enough time, and they’ve never had enough resources, and they’ve never had enough support or patronage or reward … and yet still they persist in creating. They persist because they care. They persist because they are called to be makers, by any means necessary.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Most of all, be ready. Keep your eyes open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Sniff around. Remain open. Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day. Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly passing through us, constantly trying to get our attention.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“My old man also said this about Martha Knox: “She’s not beautiful, but I think she knows how to sell it.” Well, it’s true that I wanted to hold her braid. I always had wanted to from first seeing it and mostly I wanted to in that dance, but I didn’t reach for it and I didn’t set down my beer bottle. Martha Knox wasn’t selling anything.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Pilgrims
“My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else’s shadows scared him.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Never learn to type, kiddo. And if you do learn to type, never tell anybody that you can type, or they’ll make you do it forever. Never learn shorthand, either. It’ll be the death of you. Once they put a steno pad in a woman’s hand, it never comes out.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Never put away your labors while the sun is high, Alma, with the hopes of finding more hours to work tomorrow—for you shall never have any more extra time tomorrow than you had today, and once you have fallen behindhand in your responsibilities, you will never catch up.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Not making a living,’ he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, ‘just living.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“Nothing is so essential as dignity… Time will reveal who has it and who has it not.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love – at least as far as I’ve always witnessed.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“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.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Oh, our youthful needs! Oh, the deliciously blinding yearnings of the young – which inevitably take us right to the edges of cliffs, or trap us in cul-de-sacs of our design.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, I honor the divinity that resides within me.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“One must bear what cannot be escaped,” she told Alma, as she rubbed clean her face. “You will not die of your grief – no more than the rest of us ever have.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed. She tried her best to ignore it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“Only through constant focus can you become independent. Only through independence can you know yourself. And only through knowing yourself will you be able to ask the key question of your life: What is that I am destined to accomplish, and how can I make it happen?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“Other people come here worshipping Eustace. They want to please him, so they let him take over their entire selves, and that’s when the resentment starts to build. It builds slowly, over time. What wears people down here isn’t the physical labor but the psychological stress of losing their identity.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It’s as if all our gods and angels gathered together and said, “It’s tough down there as a human being, we know. Here – have some delights.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, squander it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Perfectionism stops people from completing their work, yes – but even worse, it often stops people from beginning their work. Perfectionists often decide in advance that the end product is never going to be satisfactory, so they don’t even bother trying to be creative in the first place.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Perhaps marriage wasn’t such a great bargain for women, after all. When I looked around at all the women I knew who’d been married for more than five or ten years, I didn’t see anybody whose lives I envied. Once the romance had faded, these women all seemed to be living in constant service to their husbands.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“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
“Raising a child is the very definition of ambivalence. I am overwhelmed at times by how something can simultaneously be so awful and so rewarding.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Rome doesn’t compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed, exuding an air like: Hey – do whatever you want, but I’m still Rome. I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this town, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“Sex is so often a cheat – a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing, instead, their mere body.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“She felt simultaneously relieved and burdened: relieved of all her old questions; burdened by the answers.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“She knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“She wanted to understand the world, and she made a habit of chasing down information to its last hiding place, as though the fate of nations were at stake in every instance.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“She was of the mind that people should make their own decisions about their own lives, if you can image such a preposterous thing.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“She was paying me the compliment of her undivided attention, and thus I was instantly smitten.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Sometimes it’s just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.”
“Take me someplace where we can be silent together.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Thank heavens we have an earth, or where would we sit?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“That’s the good thing about never changing your name or your address, I suppose. People always know where to find you.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“That’s the thing about a human life – there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.” (Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes)
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“The Balinese don’t wait and see “how things go.” That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“The Bhagavad Gita-that 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.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“The difference between making a dress and making a costume, of course, is that dresses are sewn, but costumes are built. Many people these days can sew, but not many know how to build. A costume is a prop for the stage, as much as any piece of furniture, and it needs to be strong. You never know what’s going to happen in a performance, and so the costume must be ready for anything.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“The English travel writer Isabel Bird, famous for her cool and detached prose, seemed scarcely able to keep from exclaiming hubba-hubba as she checked out the rugged men she kept encountering on her trip to America in the 1850s:”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust – and those elements are universally accessible. Which does not mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“The most urgent war is always the one fought at home”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“The older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“The problem with stage actresses is that once they are gone, they are forgotten. If you never saw her perform onstage, then you would not be able to understand her power and appeal.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“The sooner and more passionately you get married to this idea – that it is ultimately entirely up to you – the better off you’ll be.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don’t need to follow it, no matter what they say. No fashion trend is compulsory, remember – and if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes “you look like a nervous person. Paris is all well and good, but we can’t just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, now can we?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“The thing about rakishness, is that it should never seem intentional.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it–even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“The trick of comedy, is not to perform it in a comic manner. Don’t try to be funny, and you’ll be funny. Just do that effortless thing you Brits do, of throwing away half the lines as though you can scarcely be bothered to care, and it’ll be brilliant. Comedy is always best when it’s thrown away.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“The trouble with so many aging actresses is that they don’t want to let nature do as it wishes.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“The world ain’t straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there’s a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn’t care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain’t straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don’t mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in – predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“There is a Dutch word, uitwaaien, “to walk against the wind for pleasure.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“There is a limit, I have found, to how much you can mourn as “tragic” the death of an older person who has lived a rich life, and who is privileged enough to die surrounded by loved ones. There are so many worse ways to live, after all, and so many worse ways to die.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The universe will shift, destiny’s molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“There were pages and pages of this. It was a confetti of thinking. It began nowhere, led to nothing, and concluded nothing.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“This is how it feels to lead the faithful creative life: You try and try and try, and nothing works. But you keep trying, and you keep seeking, and then sometimes, in the least expected place and time, it finally happens.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“This is the supreme lesson of karma – take care of the problems now, or else you’ll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering – that’s hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding – there’s where you’ll find heaven.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“This is what flirtation is in its purest form – a conversation held without words. Flirtation is a series of silent questions that one person asks another person with their eyes. And the answer to those questions is always the same word: Maybe.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“This is what I’ve found about life, as I’ve gotten older: you start to lose people. It’s not that there is ever a shortage of people – oh, heavens no. It is merely that – as the years pass – there comes to be a terrible shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history. Those people start to be plucked away by death, and they are awfully hard to replace after they go. After a certain age, it can become difficult to make new friends. The world can begin to feel lonely and sparse, teeming though it may be with freshly minted young souls.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“This was simply not enough hours. This left far too many remaining hours free, and free hours were dangerous. Free hours created too much opportunity for examining the disappointments she was meant to be grinding under her boot heel.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“To get “good” at sex – which, for a woman, means learning how to enjoy and even orchestrate the act, to the point of her own climax – one needs time, patience, and an attentive lover.” (Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes)
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“To show a longing for anything that one cannot have, for instance, is not a clever position.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don’t really want to live in it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“War is a dreadful business, but it teaches everyone something.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“We are an increasingly depressed and anxious people—and not for nothing. Arguably, all these modern conveniences have been adopted to save us time. But time for what? Having created a system that tends to our every need without causing us undue exertion or labor, we can now fill these hours with?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we’ll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“We are the way we are – there’s nothing to be done for it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable: It’s a myth and a trap and a hamster wheel that will run you to death.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Well, comedy is hard. Keeping things light is heavy work.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Well, if you can’t make a plan for your own life, then somebody needs to be your mother!”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Well, you can’t have too much conscience about things! Or else you’ll never stop worrying!”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“What all couples have ever wanted, a little bit of privacy in which to practice all manners of love.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely….Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“When a girl criticizes herself, you really should crawl to the ends of the earth to contradict her, you know. It was a well-known fact that, throughout all of the entire history of mankind, Israeli figs have always been considered the most valuable figs in the world. Israeli figs taste like granulated honey. They have skins like thin caramels. He ate more vegetables than a hippie. People thought he was crazy. Eating Haitian mangos the Puerto Rican way. First, he massaged and squeezed the mango with his thumbs until the flesh was soft and pulpy beneath the skin. He worked the fruit with his thumbs until it had the consistency of jelly. Then he bit a small hole in the top and sucked out the insides. Sweet like coconut. Foreign-tasting, but nice.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Pilgrims
“When an audience is happy with what they’re watching, they always look so goddamn proud of themselves. As if they made the play themselves, the selfish bastards.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“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.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere – wherever people are living out their lives. It’s a city with a million centers. Somehow that was even more magical to know.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“When we are young, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right – not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either. In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“When women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“When you have found your own success as a woman, you may do such a fun thing as marry a handsome man who is very much your junior. Consider it a reward for all your hard work.” (Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes)
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become log jammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“Whenever you are faced with the prospect of purchasing gloves, you must ask yourself if you would be bereft to lose one of them in the back of a taxicab. If not, then don’t buy them. You should only buy gloves so beautiful that to lose one of them would break your heart.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“Where there is life, George, there is hope. Death is so terribly final. It will come soon enough to us all. I would hesitate to wish it hastened upon anyone.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“While the paths and outcomes of creative living will vary wildly from person to person, I can guarantee you this: A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
“Work hard, make the most of your opportunities, and grow, grow, grow.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. 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 from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“You can always find girls who can dance like angels, and some boys, too. But to get a man who can dance like a man – that’s not easily found.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Committed
“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“You can never anticipate how a woman is going to react to meeting a showgirl. A showgirl in full costume is intentionally designed to make all other females look and feel insignificant by comparison. You need to have a considerable amount of self-confidence, as a woman, to stand in the lavish radiance of a showgirl without flinching, resenting, or melting away.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living. Holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“You don’t have to live like this because people tell you it’s the only way. You’re not handcuffed to your culture!”
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last American Man
“You have treasures hidden within you – extraordinary treasures – and so do I, and so does everyone around us. And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“You know how that is. Sometimes you want to rub elbows with people who weren’t raised the same way as you. Expand your horizons. Maybe it builds character.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Someone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there’s no war, and then there’s another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person – and where’s the good in that?”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
“Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby. Everything I have ever written has brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a different way. I am who I am today precisely because of what I have made and what it has made me into.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Your education isn’t over when they say it’s over; your education is over when you say it’s over.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here. I know that’s what you want for yourself, because that’s what I want for myself, too.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
“Youth and beauty – they’re such a short lease, girlie. Even if you’re the most beautiful girl in the room right now, there are ten new beauties coming up behind you all the time – younger ones, fresher ones.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
City of Girls
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