Elizabeth Gilbert

“You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”

“One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”

“If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian...I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.”

“So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together.”

“One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”

“What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced, it's that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can't wait too long. It's the single simplest measure to predict divorce.”

“This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.”

“Listen - of course money changes everything, but so does sunlight, and so does food: These are powerful but neutral energy sources, neither inherently good nor evil but shaped only by the way we use them.”

“Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie as a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.”

“Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?”

“Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all.”

“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”

“I am a writer today because I learned to love reading as a child — and mostly on account of the Oz books.”

“Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it's also a political and economic contract of the highest order.”

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”

“I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.”

“I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.”

“I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-- despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - pg 20-21”

“Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.”

“Creativity itself doesn't care at all about results - the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless.”

“Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”

“I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.”

“What are you willing to give up to live the life you are pretending you want?”

“I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now - it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there.”

“We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.”

“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”

“All I could say was, "I don't know what to do." I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, "Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.”