Elizabeth Gilbert
Novelist
1969-07-18
Books by Elizabeth Gilbert
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Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert
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If you don't learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you'll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.
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Devo farmi le ossa is how they say it in Italian. —I need to make my bones.
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... you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.
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My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive-a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too-but who amongst us lives without sacrifice?
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I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.
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I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age.
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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 time's passage without the fear that you've just frittered away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll 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 don't have any? What kind of person does that make me?Virginia Woolf wrote, Across the broad continent of a woman's 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 you're 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.
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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 a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, 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.
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This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping.
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There's this human capacity for joy and endurance, even when things are at their worst. A joy that occurs not despite our suffering, but within it.
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The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash.
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When it comes to developing a worldview, we tend to face this false division: Either you are a realist who says the world is terrible, or a naïve optimist who says the world is wonderful and turns a blind eye. [Jack] Gilbert takes this middle way, and I think it's a far better way: he says the world is terrible and wonderful, and your obligation is to joy. . . . A real, mature, sincere joy— not a cheaply earned, ignorant joy. He's not talking about building a fortress of pleasure against the assault of the world. He's talking about the miraculousness of moments of wonder and how it seems to be worth it, after all.
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[C]reative living is a path for the brave.
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Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes. (quoting Jack Gilbert)
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I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others.
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... The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world, says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.
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Because what my gradmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle of life: They gave.
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I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.
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we must take care of our families wherever we find them.
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By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later— again, for its own mysterious reasons.
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