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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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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Part
Control
Bound
Care
Ways
Obligation
Work
Responsibility
Forces
Made
Choices
Honor
People
Community
Completely
Whether
Outside
Lives
Taking
Obligations
Around
Respect
Responsibilities

More quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

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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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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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Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.
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I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.
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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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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The fantasy of the wedding day is that it represents undeniable public and private truth that you have been chosen. For that one day, you are the most valuable creature in the world - a treasure, a princess, a prize.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Thich Nhat Hanh has the ability to bring forth the state of peace that we each inherently posses merely by his presence in a room-this is divine power.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful magic skills that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition
Elizabeth Gilbert
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A lot of [erotica] was really interestingly disguised in the 19th-century as medical journals. So it would be in the voice of a learned doctor talking about somebody's pathologies. And then it would get really detailed. And then it would get really sweaty. And then you're like, This isn't a doctor! I would like to see a degree, Mister!
Elizabeth Gilbert
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This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.
Elizabeth Gilbert