Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesnt compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed, exuding an air like: Hey- do whatever you want, but Im 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 Rome when I am an old lady.

Bravery means doing something scary.

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.

We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, Ive been there. This was unclear to him at first-Ive been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.So sadness is a place? Giovanni asked.Sometimes people live there for years, I said.

ceremony is essential to humans: Its 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 dont stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change…

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 familys history.

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 lifes 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 persons life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.

The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies.

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, theyre experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the Wait-a-Minute Moment - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering whats in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose.

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes a family unit to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days.

There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.

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.

How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? Its the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy - If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well.But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark times passage without the fear that youve just fritted away your time on earth without being relevant? Youll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I dont have any? What kind of person does that make me?Virginia Woolf wrote, Across the broad continent of a womans life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if youre crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.

We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth... you will always be in despair.

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Whos in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone elses body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and Im the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!

I also know that I wont go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I dont think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons- sometimes out of pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.

What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God