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008240f
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I don't want to be afraid of bright colors, or new sounds, or big love, or risky decisions, or strange experiences, or weird endeavors, or sudden changes, or even failure.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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e7e5a5e
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I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet to come surprises.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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b97b64e
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Everything falls apart. The only thing in life that is permanent is family.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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e55d956
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am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving. I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand--through rational thought--that which cannot be understood at all. There is no exact principle to be found here. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground--unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation ..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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a795ad6
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Last spring, David had offered this crazy solution to our woes, only half in jest:... "What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together- in misery, but happy to not be apart." Let it be a testimony to how desperately I love this guy that I have spent the last ten months giving that offer serious..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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48e492f
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Go be whomever you want to be, then. Do whatever you want to do. Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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7e92515
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I would like never to travel again. 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.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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4c94c2f
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When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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f9d6cec
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There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.
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love
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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81995e9
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The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.
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marriage
love
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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e09115b
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The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. 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 ..
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memoir
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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d61d603
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Your father only has one foot on this earth. And really, really long legs . . .
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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af6e104
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I'm so excited about school. I'm such a shameless student. I laid my clothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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e191a6a
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I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check.
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love
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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4175616
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We Americans often say that marriage is hard work. I'm not sure that the Hmong would understand this notion. Life is hard work, of course, and work is very hard work -- I'm quite certain they would agree with those statements - but how does marriage become hard work? 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. A rec..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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9d8cbcf
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There's a reason they call God a presence-because God is right here, right now.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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eef9d58
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Perhaps creativity's greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir--something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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162a08c
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you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.
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strength
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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da95215
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Love is like that is a deep well with steep sides. Once you fall in, that's it. You will love that person always.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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4f9c3d5
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I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried- in neat little rows- the personal dreams they have given up for their families
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women-warriors
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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42bd67e
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n lbHth `n lrD~ lyhdf l~ lHmy@ wlfy'd@ ldhtytyn, bl yshkl hb@ krym@ ll`lm. ftkhlS lmr mn kl bw'sh, yzyHh mn lTryq. ly`wd `qb@, lys 'mm nfsh wHsb, bl w'mm lakhryn 'yDa. `ndh fqT ySbH Hra lkhdm@ lns wlstmt` bhbhm.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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5dc3026
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No, when I refer to "creative living," I am speaking more broadly. I'm talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear."
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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e985d99
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bHthy `n Dltk kmn ybHth `n lm lkhmd lnr lmsht`lh fy r'sh
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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3cfb384
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At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is-if only so you can go on and make other things with a glad and determined heart.
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perfectionism
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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f662261
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The secret to falling in love so fast, of course, is not to know the person at all. You just need to identify one exciting feature about them, and then you hurl your heart at that one feature, with full force, trusting that this will be enough of a foundation for lasting devotion.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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767a44b
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I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, wich of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this dispair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad's fault?) Was it just temporal, a "bad time" in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generation..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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d9be66f
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Where there is life, George, there is hope. Death is so terribly final. It will come soon enough to us all. I would hesitate to wish it hastened upon anyone.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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308039a
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I wrote every day throughout my twenties. For a while, I had a boyfriend who was a musician, and he practiced every day. He played scales; I wrote small fictional scenes. It was the same idea - to keep your hand in your craft, to stay close to it. On bad days, when I felt no inspiration at all, I would set the kitchen timer for thirty minutes and make myself sit there and scribble something, anything. I had read an interview with John Updik..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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2df3365
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This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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f9f7ce3
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We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and morality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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a64e0a7
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But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried f..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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949a99d
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Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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f7a8874
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What was there for Harper Lee to be afraid of, after all? Possibly just this: That she could not outdo Harper Lee.)
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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f504f2e
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When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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bbf4262
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First spouses, I have learned, don't ever really go away--even if you aren't speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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fa48e7c
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Gratitude, always. Always, gratitude.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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ea1b14d
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And maybe it's like that with every important aspect of your life. Whatever it is you are pursuing, whatever it is you are seeking, whatever it is you are creating, be careful not to quit too soon.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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1e4d273
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Greek and the Hebrew--and whichever side you embrace more strongly determines to a large extent how you see life. From the Greeks--specifically from the glory days of ancient Athens--we have inherited our ideas about secular humanism and the sanctity of the individual. The Greeks gave us all our notions about democracy and equality and personal liberty and scientific reason and intellectual freedom and open-mindedness and what we might call..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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cc041c9
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I love him and therefore I want to protect him -- even from me, if that makes sense. I didn't want to skip any steps of preparation, or leave anything unresolved that might reemerge later to harm us -- to harm him.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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9a867ae
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Not making a living,' he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, 'just living.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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935e34c
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Culturally, though not theologically, I'm a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can't swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian...
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religion
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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961ff8b
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I especially love watching Marcus Aurelius fighting his perfectionism in order to get back to work on his writing, regardless of the results. "Get a move on," he writes to himself, "and don't worry whether anyone will give you credit for it. And don't go expecting Plato's 'Republic;' be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant." Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it endearing and e..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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3ed01af
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The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.
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memoir
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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2d18721
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He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel,
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Elizabeth Gilbert |