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I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
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Waterbury
Connecticut
Become
Foreign
Remote
Long
Object
Alien
Really
Objects
Ridicule
Learned
Giant
Least
Polite
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Guests
Visitor
Culture
Aliens
Visitors
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Guest

More quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

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I said, It seems like you have fond feelings toward your ex-wife. Are you two still close? Nah, he said casually. She thinks I changed my name to Motherfucker.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I completely respect the ways people are bound in the lives that they have, whether it's because of forces outside of their control or choices that they've made that they want to honor with their own responsibilities and obligations - taking care of people around them or being a part of a community, or their work.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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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Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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)
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
Elizabeth Gilbert
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As a writer, you always read in two minds: You read as a reader and you enjoy it, and you look at it as a writer, and you just admire the architecture and the construction.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I can see how the authorities could not like Todd [ Willingham], because he's not a person who is going to give you respect if you don't deserve it just because you say something.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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As somebody who, in my second marriage, insisted on a prenuptial agreement, I can also testify that sometimes it is an act of love to chart the exit strategy before you enter the union, in order to make sure that not only you, but your partner as well, knows that there will be no World War III should hearts and minds, for any sad reason, change.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I feel like all this stuff that we make: books and art and music, all of it. There's this energy that circles the world that wants to be made manifest, and it is just looking for someone to come through. And it's dying for you to make it. And if you don't do it, it will go find somebody else.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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My mom is a master gardener and I grew up on a farm. I came back to it really late in life and discovered that despite how lazy and inattentive I was as a child, I had managed to accidentally learn quite a bit about gardening.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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You have the opposite of poker face. You have like.. miniature golf face.
Elizabeth Gilbert