Elizabeth Gilbert Love Quotes and Sayings
Elizabeth Gilbert Love Quotes and Sayings
#1-2 Eat Pray Love 10th-Anniversary Edition: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Penguin, 30 January 2007
1. I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.
2. 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 I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
#3-6 Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Bloomsbury Publishing, 16 November 2009
3. It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.
4. To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
5. In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.
6. Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing and you were in the best possible place in the world for it—in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace.
#7-10 The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims, A&C Black, 24 September 2010
7. To be fully seen by somebody, then, and to be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous.
8. People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of that.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.
9. 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 Who’s in charge?
10. Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.
#11 Committed: A Love Story, Penguin, 5 January 2010
11. As an old friend of mine once told me, you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Elizabeth M. Gilbert (born July 18, 1969) is an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoirs, Eat, Pray, Love, which as of December 2010, has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.
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Sayings by Elizabeth Gilbert
#1-4 Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, A&C Black, 5 March 2007, Biography & Autobiography
1. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s 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 you’ll 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.
2. …you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.
3. Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.
4. At some point…you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.
#5-7 Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Bloomsbury Publishing, 16 November 2009
5. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
6. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
7. There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.
#8-9 The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims, A&C Black, 24 September 2010 – Biography & Autobiography
8. 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 else’s 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. When it isn’t there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient’s body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor.
9. As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff of it is bad for you.
#10-11 Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Bloomsbury Publishing, 16 November 2009
10. 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.
11. I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
#12-16 Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Bloomsbury Publishing, 16 November 2009
12. 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.
13. I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, ‘I agree with you.’ Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.
14. …deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, 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.
15. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.
16. On the other hand, the Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.
#17-18 Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, A&C Black, 5 March 2007 – Biography & Autobiography
17. I wondered, “Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?”
18. When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
#19-24 Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Bloomsbury Publishing, 16 November 2009
19. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.
20. 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. That’s where you need to go.
21. 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.
22. I was doing something I’d never done before. A small thing, granted, but how often do I get to say that? And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?
23. When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.
24. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.
#25 Eat Pray Love 10th-Anniversary Edition: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Penguin, 30 January 2007 – Biography & Autobiography
25. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy.