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I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Happiness
Surprises
Future
Choosing
Making
Unknown
Come
Fill
Life
Surprise
Suffering
Space

More quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

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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.
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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Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying,We understand how it is - we have one, too.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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The nineteenth century was the last moment in history when a relatively educated layperson could follow what was going on in the world of science and invention to a wide degree. Also, there were no professionals. This was a time when amateur explorers, naturalists and enthusiasts were are still making major contributions to progress.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I want to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Women are capable of enduring a tremendous amount of disappointment and still have a good life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Whatever this feeling is - this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
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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Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.
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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Attraversiamo (meaning Lets cross over in Italian)
Elizabeth Gilbert
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This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.
Elizabeth Gilbert