Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

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 elses life with perfection.

When youre lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that youve just wandered off the path, that youll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and its time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you dont even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.

It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.

You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

Instructions for freedom:1. Lifes metaphors are Gods instructions.2. You have just climbed up and above the roof, there is nothing between you and the Infinite; now, let go.3. The day is ending, its time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go.4. Your wish for resolution was a prayer. You are being here is Gods response, let go and watch the stars came out, in the inside and in the outside.5. With all your heart ask for Grace and let go. 6. With all your heart forgive him, forgive yourself and let him go.7. Let your intention be freedom from useless suffering then, let go.8. Watch the heat of day pass into the cold night, let go.9. When the Karma of a relationship is done, only Love remains. Its safe, let go.10. When the past has past from you at last, let go.. then, climb down and begin the rest of your life with great joy.

Parla come magni, It means, Speak the way you eat, or in my personal translation: Say it like you eat it. Its a reminder - when youre making a big deal out of explaining something, when youre searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Dont make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one, always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as youre banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it wont. You have to admit that you cant catch it. That youre not supposed to catch it. At some point, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?

I look at the Augusteum,and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to 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. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

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 youre someone hes 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. Youre a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So thats it. You have now reached infatuations final destination-- the complete and merciless devaluation of self. - pg 20-21

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

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

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. In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand fromme to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page. Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND… I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too.

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.

Were miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.

The day is ending. Its time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, Let go.

Theres no trouble in this world so serious that it cant be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.

The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.