"Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?"
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Quote collection
Elizabeth Gilbert quotes (page 17 of 32)
633 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation."
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"To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say-- no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud."
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"When you want to do something creative and you want to do something new, you have to start with the thing that's making you want to jump up out of bed in the morning."
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"All of women's stories in the 19th century had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage at the end and you were happy; or you had the terrible Henry James savage downfall because of your own hubris as a woman, or you've made some great error leading you down a path to ruin. One is the story of love that's successful and the other is the story usually of reckless love that goes terribly wrong that destroys the woman."
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"Women are capable of enduring a tremendous amount of disappointment and still have a good life."
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"Watch for the people whose eyes light up when you talk about your dream. Those are the people you keep."
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"True power comes from standing in your own truth and walking your own path."
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"Fear can have a voice, but it doesn't get a vote."
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"You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here."
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"You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you."
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"When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation with it."
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"Lay your wishes aside for a spell, and look deep into what you believe about yourself. Make sure your beliefs about your own life are anchored in greatness, in holiness, in worth, in grace, in joy, in excitement -in internal certainties rather than external circumstances. Because that belief? That's where you're heading, no matter what it may look like on the outside."
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"Go back to bed', said the omniscient interior voice, because you don't need to know the final answer right now, at three o'clock in the morning on the Thursday in November. 'Go back to bed', because I love you. 'Go back to bed', beacause the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer."
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"God is an experience of supreme love."
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"Nobody's really paying that much attention to your massive personal dramas."
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"If we never leave our house except to drive to work, do we need to be even remotely aware of this powerful, humbling, extraordinary and eternal life force that surges and ebbs around us all the time? Apparently not. Because we have stopped paying attention."
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"I won the argument against the knife that night, but barely. I had some other good ideas around that time--about how jumping off a building or blowing my brains out with a gun might stop the suffering. but something about spending a night with a knife in my hand did it. The next morning I called my friend Susan as the sun came up, begged her to help me. I don't think a woman in the whole history of my family had ever done that before, had ever sat in the middle of the road like that and said, in the middle of her life, "I cannot walk another step further--somebody has to help me."
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"You are still young, so you think only of your own self. You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish... But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering-no matter what you think of them and their supposed good fortune."
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"Every day when you wake up, ask yourself, 'What do I really, really, really want? ' You have to say really, really, really, otherwise you won't believe it."
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