Words matter. These are the best Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think sometimes we look at other people’s marriages and we think they must always be so happy together. I don’t know anybody who’s married for a long time who hasn’t somehow made room in their love story for the hate and resentment that they sometimes feel toward each other.
When somebody has an enormous success in this culture, people start asking two questions, which are ‘What are you doing now?’ and ‘How are you going to beat that?’ And I have to say, I love the assumption that your intention is to beat yourself constantly – that you’re in battle against yourself.
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.
I should just put it bluntly, because we’re all sort of friends here now – it’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o’clock in the morning, and I don’t want to go there.
I used to say, ‘Man, I think I’d be a really good dad. I’ll be a great provider. I’m funny; I’ll go on trips with them – I’ll do all sorts of stuff.’ But the momming? I’m not made for that. I have a really good mom; I know what she put into it.
But when it comes to writing the thing that I’ve sort of been thinking about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do.
I think that people who live in cultures without quite so much privilege, opportunity or grandiosity have a little bit more respect for the workings of destiny, and the limitations that people can find themselves in through no fault of their own.
What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced, it’s that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can’t wait too long. It’s the single simplest measure to predict divorce.
There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I’m alone and trying to solve a sentence. It’s exciting, even when it’s frustrating, even when I can’t do it right.
My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence.
I push every day against forces that say you have to go faster, be more effective, be more productive, you have to constantly outdo yourself, you have to constantly outdo your neighbor – all of the stuff that creates an incredibly productive society, but also a very neurotic one.
I was a bartender for a long time, so I know how to make drinks, but I’m more likely to offer them than to have them. I think this is one of the reasons why I get to live longer than my great-grandmother did, and why I get to produce more writing than she did, and why my marriage isn’t in dire straits.
Mine is just a simple old human story – of one person trying, with great rigor and discipline, to comprehend her personal relationship with divinity.
Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it’s also a political and economic contract of the highest order.
Most important, though, I had to wait until I found the perfect traveling/eating/drinking/napping companion. And I did finally find him, two years ago – my Brazilian-born, French-speaking, wine-worshipping, tripe-consuming, uncomplaining traveler of a sweetheart.
If I could read while I was driving, showering, socializing or sleeping, I would do it.
Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn’t always hold.
I’ve come to realize that the contemporary creative culture is not generating the best possible outcome.
Now, if you are like me – if you are like practically anybody in America – then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or… you know… all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.
Men go into marriage with virtually no expectations whatsoever. Ten years later, the men are delightfully surprised to find out that it’s actually kind of nice, and the women have sort of had to take a nose dive from what they thought it was going to be.
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.
These days I settle for feeling only 85 percent sure about most things, most of the time. I believe this is keeping me sane, and I also believe that it’s keeping me human. In fact, I’m 85 percent sure of it.
My writing practice taught me the important thing is steadfastness. It’s not necessarily discipline. Discipline can become a prison. When your spiritual practices become another thing for you to be anxious about, they’ve lost their usefulness.
I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can’t find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.
When I lost my friends, it was because I had used the power of giving on them recklessly. I swept into their lives with my big fat checkbook, and I erased years of obstacles for them overnight – but sometimes, in the process, I also accidentally erased years of dignity.
I feel like there are women who are genuinely born to be mothers, and women who are born to be aunties, and women who really probably not should be allowed near children. The tragedy that happens is when any one of those women ends up in the wrong category.
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.
We set up one rule in our house, which is, ‘Guests of guests cannot bring guests.’ That rule was required because that happened one weekend, and we finally said, ‘Okay, you know what? That’s a little too much.’
Nobody until very recently would have thought that their husband was supposed to be their best friend, confidante, intellectual soul mate, co-parent, inspiration.
Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall,’ which blew the top of my head straight off. I’ve read it three times, and I’m still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.
I have a rigid self-accountability. You have to work hard.
But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome – people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they’re meant to. My husband is a really fantastic cook. His mother is Italian and if you walk into our house, we assume you’re starving.
If you are given only one opportunity to speak, be certain your voice is heard.
I have these new policies toward my life, like ‘I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.’
When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days – with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents – I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through.
Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I’m willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I’m willing to have more boring friends, who are sane.
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.
Absolute certainty is not something I strive for anymore. I’ve learned the hard way that destiny usually looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement, or perhaps even pity.
Childlessness doesn’t make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish.