All of women's stories in the 19th century had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
That's your friend. My husband is my best friend. He's not the mirror that holds up my flaws. He's just the guy who's like,… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
“Not to mention that I have finally arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
“The Buddha taught that all human suffering is rooted in desire. Don't we all know this to be true? Any of us who have… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
“And while [we] do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it's important to remember that our choice-rich lives… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
If we never leave our house except to drive to work, do we need to be even remotely aware of this powerful, humbling, extraordinary… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker," he continued, as though he had not heard her. "We… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
“Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else.” — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to,… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
“I live in nature where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is the planet around the… — Elizabeth Gilbert Copy Share Image
![“And while [we] do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it's important to remember that our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble. We are susceptible to emotional uncertainties and neuroses that are probably not very common among the Hmong, but that run rampant these days among my contemporaries in, say, Baltimore. The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice...Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision. By choosing Door Number Three, we fear we have killed off a different -- but equally critical piece of our soul that could only have been made manifest by walking through Door Number One or Door Number Two. ...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 advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating causes of "life envy": the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy. All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives - as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, "Are you certain this is what you really wanted?" And nowhere does that question risk haunting us more than in our marriages, precisely because the emotional stakes of that most intensely personal choice have become so huge.” quote by Elizabeth Gilbert](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/7fb/elizabeth-gilbert-131_choice_and-while-we-do-have-possibilities-that_30637.jpg)
