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

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I cannot overstate the power of libraries in my life.
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The resting place of the mind is the heart.
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Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.
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The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
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The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.
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The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.
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This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.
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I feel like if I were to get another tattoo, it would probably be those two words. Just stubborn, stubborn, stubborn gladness.
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It used to be that god was revealed in the wonders of nature now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.
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As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop)
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True power comes from standing in your own truth and walking your own path.
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When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost.
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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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Life's metaphors are God's instructions.
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There's this great kind of spooky dance that happens that I can't access any other way. I think most of us are given kind of one pathway to that dance, and that's why I'm a writer. It's the only way I can get there. I can't do it through art, I can't do it through singing, I can't do it through mothering, I can't do it through invention.
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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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One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
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Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.
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Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people it's also a political and economic contract of the highest order.
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I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.
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