Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.

Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?

To show a longing for anything that one cannot have, for instance, is not a clever position.

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.

Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy's distraction.

the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry.

Parla Come Mangi' --It is a common way to say 'be simple', 'don't try to be rhetorical' literaly: 'speak the way you eat

To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.

You never know how a good quest is going to end.

I believe in miracles, I believe in the Law of Attraction, but even I don't think I'm big enough to manifest five Asian elephants cloaked in gold.

There's only one problem with the hero's journey, it never included women.

The hero's journey is simply who we are as human beings.

My whole life I've been an over-giver. My general operating policy has always been, 'If it belongs to me, don't worry: You can have it!'

There's nothing special about your fear.

The mosquitoes here are big enough to rape a chicken.

I've been screwed and sued and tattooed, and I'm still standin' here in front of you.

I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection.

I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women.

Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.

Everything really is going to be okay. (And if not okay, then at least comic.)

Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is American, too-the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness.

But vegetarians can eat this...Because intestines aren't even meat, Liz. They're just sh$*.

You make some big grandoise decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself.

Love renders all of our plans and all of our hopes a gamble.

If Todd [Willingham] was guilty of anything, it was just his self-preservation. He got up and ran out of the house and then thought about the children after the fact.

As a writer, you always read in two minds: You read as a reader and you enjoy it, and you look at it as a writer, and you just admire the architecture and the construction.

The idea that a prisoner would confess to a complete stranger that he had committed a crime - I just didn't buy that.

I can see how the authorities could not like Todd [ Willingham], because he's not a person who is going to give you respect if you don't deserve it just because you say something.

For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.

I went to Shea Stadium and used the men's room. Terrifying. There was this little kid looking at me through the crack [in the stall]. and I was like, "If you tell anyone what you've seen..."

If you want to know the world, sometimes you have to get out and roll around.

Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.

I think another way that you can really harm yourself as an artist is by buying into the mythology that it's really important.

My work is incredibly important to me personally. It brings me joy and it brings me life and it brings me meaning. It doesn't necessarily have to be important to the people who read it.

No experience in this world has ever been cathartic without the willing participation of the individual. Life does not automatically bestow wisdom or growth upon anyone just for showing up.

I don't think you can say that feminism has made women critical of marriage because women have been critical of marriage for centuries.

You almost can't wait too long [to get married]. The longer you wait, the better off you are going to be. And the happier your kids are going to be, and the happier a mom you are going to be.

Reality has taught us that no woman can build an honest life without sacrificing something along the way. Deciding what will be sacrificed is not easy.

You have to work ceaselessly on your end to digest and imbibe your opportunities or, I have come to believe, they will gradually slip away and knock on someone else's more receptive door.

It is completely acceptable to be tired because it means you're working hard. But it's not acceptable to be stressed because that means things are going wrong or your head is broken.

All the parts of us that we ever were are always going to be with us. You make space to carry them and you just try not to let them drive. But you can't chuck them out either.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

The reality, certainly in my life, is that we all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it.

I've ruined my eyes, I've ruined my health from my studiousness!

I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books.

Marriage is a strange combination of dream and reality, and we spend our lives as couples trying to negotiate that divide.

Creativity asks you to enter realms with uncertain outcomes. People want to create a safe life for themselves so they try to live without fear and they end up killing their creativity in the process.

Maturity brings - among other things - the ability to sustain and survive enormous contradictions and disappointments.

Marriage is - among other things - a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love.

Marriage is not a game for the young.