Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth M. Gilbertis an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist, and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and which was also made into a film by the same name in 2010...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 July 1969
CityWaterbury, CT
CountryUnited States of America
heart thinking broken
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. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That's a kind of personal story of mine that I don't think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.
love heartbreak character
In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.
beautiful art real
For most of Western civilization there was no real division between the realms of science, divinity, and artistic endeavor - they were just three strands of the same braid, all of them pulling toward the same beautiful desire: to try to understand the workings of this curious and beautiful world. There were many people who would have called themselves all three things at once: men of god, men of science, men of the arts.
lonely dog pain
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. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure I'm lonely I'm a failure I'm lonely) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.
life beauty beautiful
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.
inspirational crumbling want
We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we are afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
opportunity destiny interesting
I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.
blessing follow-your-dreams eat-love-pray
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.
heartbreak hope lost-love
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
beautiful long curiosity
You might get nothing out of it at all except a beautiful, long life where all you did was follow your gorgeous curiosity. And that should be enough too.
self-worth once-upon-a-time never-forget
Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.
strong-women disappointment struggle
Being a woman did not look enviable to me, even when it looked admirable. It looked like nonstop sacrifice and service. Because it was. Being a woman seemed vulnerable and sad. Even the strong women I knew - and they were all strong - had earned their strength through enduring huge disappointments and tremendous struggles.
inspirational life emotional
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
trust dream hope
The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.