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Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.
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lessons
life
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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3777cd0
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Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you're gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can't learn to master your thinking, you're in deep trouble forever.
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thinking
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.
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work
yesterday
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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With each reunion (we) had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me?
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relationships
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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a25597c
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Everything really is going to be okay. (And if not okay, then at least comic.)
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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So this, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainment.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Done is better than good.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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c164c11
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A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner--continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you--is a fine art, in and of itself.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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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. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up..
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spiritual
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Take me someplace where we can be silent together.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later--again, for its own mysterious reasons.
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heart
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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89c0dec
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He showed me a sketch he'd drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart. To find the balance you want," Ketut spoke through his translator, "this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounde..
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faith
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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0d69dac
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I have my own set of survival techniques. I am patient. I know how to pack light. But my one might travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody. I can make friends with the dead. If there isn't anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of sheetrock. That is why I'm not afraid to travel to the most remote places in the world, not if there are human beings there to meet. People asked me b..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights but also devote myself to God.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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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.
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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.
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marriage
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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bb54663
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the number 108 is held to be the most auspicious, a perfect three-digit multiple of three, its components adding up to 9, which is three threes. And 3, of course, is the number representing supreme balance.
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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.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch--there's not a chance.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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I am the planet's most affectionate life-form, something like the cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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b75a88f
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Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I'm far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others-- why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion... but that is not my business. We are all different, I suppose. All I ever wanted was to know this world. I can say now, as I reach my..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.
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powerlessness
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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1802bc1
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We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, 'I've been there.' This was unclear to him at first-I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a be..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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9355bd6
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The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.
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companionship
love
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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168e3a0
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At that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), that's when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message: You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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5b60ca2
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You're not required to save the world with your creativity. Your art not only doesn't have to be original, in other words, it also doesn't have to be important. For example, whenever anyone tells me that they want to write a book in order to help other people I always think 'Oh, please don't. Please don't try to help me.' I mean it's very kind of you to help people, but please don't make it your sole creative motive because we will feel the..
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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fa7ecd7
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My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?
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heartbreak
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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It's a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person that you will ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Sou..
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soul-mates
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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23f429c
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I look at the Augusteum,and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true ..
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eat-pray-love
elizabeth-gilbert
life
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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4e66619
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Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predicatable of calamities.
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fidelity
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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71e20c6
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Time -- when pursued like a bandit -- will behave like one; always remaining one country or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping ou the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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1cb6cbf
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But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with think, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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412281f
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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.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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6d553a2
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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)
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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ae36d1e
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This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
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solitude
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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1b24005
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But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.
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Elizabeth Gilbert |