Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.

Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you dont really want to live in it.

The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. Thats where you need to go.

You have been to hell, Ketut?He smiled. Of course hes been there.Whats it like in hell? Same like in heaven, he said.He saw my confusion and tried to explain. Universe is a circle, Liss.He said. To up, to down -- all same, at end.I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?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. He laughed.Same-same, he said. Same in end, so better to be happy in journey.I said, So, if heaven is love, then hell is.. Love, too, he said. Ketut laughed again, Always so difficult for young people to understand this!

At that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), thats when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message:You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.

So I stood up and did a handstand on my Gurus roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isnt something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. Thats our privilege. Thats the joy of a mortal body. And thats why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile.(From Ketut Liyer, the Balinese healer)

Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine.

Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline. Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity.

As the saying goes, Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them. Why would I want to keep my limitations?

Fear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and thats what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything thats holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person youll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.

I am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving.

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.

Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying,We understand how it is - we have one, too.

When she was pregnant with her second child, a midwife asked if Catherine had any unspoken fears about anything that could go wrong with the baby - such as genetic defects or complications during the birth. My sister said, My only fear is that he might grow up to become a Republican.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

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. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.