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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.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Think
Alone
Artistic
Thinking
Whatever
Allowed
Family
Discipline
Everything
Creativity
Take
Baby
Going
Learned
Work
Taught
Temperament
Never
Imagination
Apply

More quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

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When I read the article [in The New Yorker] by David Grann, I was very struck by people responding to the article, of people thinking I was such a hero and what a wonderful person I was, and I didn't feel that at all. I felt like I had very much, like Todd [Willingham], taken a path of self-preservation.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you - the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love - may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State, and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega--a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets.
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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A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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The reality, certainly in my life, is that we all have love stories that go terribly wrong we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Just having walked into a prison environment, sat there for two hours, the effect that it had on me. ... I couldn't imagine the effect it would have on a person 24 hours a day. So then I became more intrigued, and we began a correspondence, and I began visiting [Todd Willingham].
Elizabeth Gilbert
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too many maniacs not enough michelangelos
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.
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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If you want to get to the castle, Groceries, you've got to swim the moat.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect-only if they happen to be talking about Judaism.
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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Attraversiamo (meaning Lets cross over in Italian)
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I think that if you can roast a chicken, you can get whatever you want out of a woman.
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 for discipline—it's important, but sort of overrated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.
Elizabeth Gilbert