Quote

I think another way that you can really harm yourself as an artist is by buying into the mythology that it's really important.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Harm
Artist
Another
Important
Really
Way
Think
Mythology
Thinking
Buying

More quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

Image
Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
The mosquitoes here are big enough to rape a chicken.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It's the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
They say that there are three kinds of people in the world. There are people who never learn one way or another anything there are people who learn from their own mistakes, eventually and with great pain and then there are the really wise people who learn from other people's mistakes and spare themselves the suffering.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
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
Image
Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now - it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
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
Image
Nothing is less efficient than perfectionism.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
You might get nothing out of it at all except a beautiful, long life where all you did was follow your gorgeous curiosity. And that should be enough too.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image
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.
Elizabeth Gilbert