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
Character
Refuse
Devastated
Firsts
Characters
Heartbreak
Need
Role
Demanding
First
Created
Invent
Needs
Roles
Always
Feeling
Perform
Love
Feelings
Desperate
Place
Partners

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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.
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Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.
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Women are capable of enduring a tremendous amount of disappointment and still have a good life.
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Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!
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Fear can have a voice, but it doesn't get a vote.
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The hero's journey is simply who we are as human beings.
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There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.
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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.
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You love new boyfriend? I think so. Yes. Then you must spoil him. And he must spoil you.
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every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimatesecrets of your marriage.
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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.
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Until I can feel as ecstatic about having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for giant squid, I cannot have a baby.
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