Elizabeth Gilbert

"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."

"You know, why at the end of your life should you assemble thousands of pages of 'Why am I so sad, why am I so depressed' Instead, assemble thousands of pages of why you're so content."

"I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny... I forgive him everything."

"I think it's unfortunate that there exists only one path in America to complete social legitimacy, and that is marriage. I think, for instance, that it would be far easier for Americans to elect a black president or a female president than an unmarried president."

"I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss."

"There were times, especially when I was traveling for 'Eat, Pray, Love,' when, I swear to God, I would feel this weight of my female ancestors, all those Swedish farmwives from beyond the grave who were like, 'Go! Go to Naples! Eat more pizza! Go to India, ride an elephant! Do it! Swim in the Indian Ocean. Read those books. Learn a language."

"Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple, there they revere the family."

"Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever."

"It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality."