Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that its like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. Thats what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each others stories. (p.237)

I asked, You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell - the destinations - are the same thing anyway?Same - same, he said. Same in end, so better to be happy on journey.I said, So, if heaven is love, then hell is...Love, too, he said.

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.

This much I do know - Im exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices and chaotic passions.

Nothing is so essential as dignity. Time will reveal who has it and wi has it not. -Beatrix Whittaker

But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with think, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didnt. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.

The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they dont bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing - Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they dont agitate my home. Theres room for all of us in this neighborhood.

So this was the Ashrams final joke on me? Once I had learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully embrace my inner Key Hostess - only then could I become The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, after all?

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 is that I am destined to accomplish, and how can I make it happen?

I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way.

I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.

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. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

Most of my writing life consist of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and thats how it gets done.

Guilts just your egos way of tricking you into thinking that youre making moral progress. Dont fall for it, my dear.

Thats just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that youre flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.

Ive had to keep defining and defending myself as a writer every single day of my adult life -- constantly reminding and re-reminding my soul and the cosmos that Im very serious about the business of creative living, and that I will never stop creating, no matter what the outcome, and no matter how deep my anxieties and insecurities may be.

The other day in prayer I said to God, Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?.

If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary encironments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble” – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so?

Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch--theres not a chance.