Elizabeth Gilbert

"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."

"It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away."

"When you're 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 you've just wandered off the path, that you'll 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 it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore."

"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 else's life with perfection."

"Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."

"A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never."

"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)"

"So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's 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--isn't 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. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands."

"Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there."

"I was doing something I'd never done before. And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?"

"At that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), that's 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."

"You have been to hell, Ketut?He smiled. Of course he's been there. What's 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!"

"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."

"Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue."

"I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker, he continued, as though he had not heard her. We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything."

"I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life."

"I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding."

"My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis."

"Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people it's also a political and economic contract of the highest order."

"I don't think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life."