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That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
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Waterbury
Connecticut
Way
Group
Would
Groups
Life
Changed
Control
Ever
Human
Humans
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Turned

More quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

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What are you willing to give up, in order to become who you really need to be?
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Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.
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God wants us to be in joy, God wants us to be happy. Because of this extraordinary consciousness and this great ability for wonder and marvel, and without denying any of the terrors and horrors of the world, we also have an obligation toward joy and toward miracle and excitement.
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I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.
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Fear can have a voice, but it doesn't get a vote.
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It seems obvious that there comes period in your life when you have to learn to say no to things you don't want to do. But the biggest trickiest lesson in holding on the stalwart committment to your creativity is learning how to say no to the things you do want to do.
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In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work.
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Everything good I've ever gotten in life, I only got because I gave something else up.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I am the planet's most affectionate life-form, something like the cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frustrated with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm and said, Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. ... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity but he always does that.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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If you're going to answer the call and you're going to transform and you're going to change, get ready. It is not a day at the beach.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it--even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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
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The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit.
Elizabeth Gilbert