Quote

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.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Needs
Roles
Invent
Always
Feeling
Perform
Love
Feelings
Desperate
Place
Partners
Character
Refuse
Firsts
Characters
Devastated
Need
Role
Heartbreak
First
Created
Demanding

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Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
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According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. this is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile--just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can...bliss.
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This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.
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I was the baby of the family, but I was never babied, and that allowed me to take whatever artistic temperament I had and apply learned discipline. I was taught how to work. I think that's everything. Creativity and imagination alone are not going to get you there.
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If life gives you lemons, don't settle for simply making lemonade - make a glorious scene at a lemonade stand.
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I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine.
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To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business-not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into... rhetoric and plot.
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We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.
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I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.
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Our relationship now thoroughly ruined, with even civility destroyed between us, all I wanted anymore was the door.
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This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.
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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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too many maniacs not enough michelangelos
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Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me thier badges. I know these guys very well.
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Attraversiamo (meaning Lets cross over in Italian)
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The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.
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What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!
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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.
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There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with.
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