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You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Memoir
Fiction
Write
Writing

More quotes by 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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How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?
Elizabeth Gilbert
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But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome - people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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meditation vs prayer = listening vs talking
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. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.
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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Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
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
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In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.
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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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
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Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit.
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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I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Fear can have a voice, but it doesn't get a vote.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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If life gives you lemons, don't settle for simply making lemonade - make a glorious scene at a lemonade stand.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Keep showing up for your side of the job and give genius a chance to do its part.
Elizabeth Gilbert