Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say Lho provato sulla mia pelle, which means I have experienced that on my own skin. Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what youre going through.

Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when youre as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder.

Well... why is a hard question to answer in any language.

Liz: Whats it like in hell?Ketut: Same like heaven. Universe is a circle, Liss. To up, to down -- all same, at end.Liz: Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?Ketut: Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss.Liz: You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell -- same destinations -- are the same thing anyway?Ketut: Same-same. Same in end, so better be happy on journey.

We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoys fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.

I am openly prideful, secretly judgemental, and cowardly in conflict.

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an urban Thoreau) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...

Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes youre gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. Thats the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you cant learn to master your thinking, youre in deep trouble forever.

I am a better person when I have less on my plate.

Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me and tell me that you did.

I had to do something about my longing, so I got up, went to the kitchen in my nightgown, peeled a pound of potatoes, boiled them up, sliced them, fried them in butter, salted them generously and ate every bite of them - asking my body the whole while if it would please accept the satisfaction of a pound of fried potatoes in lieu of the fulfillment of lovemaking.My body replied, only after eating every bite of food: No deal, babe.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that youre with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.

And always remember that peoples judgements about you are none of your business.

Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself.

We must all get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something

Ive spent so much time these last years wondering what Im supposed to be. A wife? A lover? A celibate? An Italian? A glutton? A traveler? An artist? A Yogi? But Im not any of these things, at least not completely. And Im not Crazy Aunt Liz, either. Im just a slippery antevasin - betwixt and between - a student on the ever-shifting border near the wonderful, scary forest of the new.

Like most humanoids, 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. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but-whoop!-how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then its all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.

But it is my understanding that the health of the planet is affected by the health of every individual on it. As long as even two souls are locked in conflict, the whole of the world is contaminated by it.