Elizabeth Gilbert: I have searched frantically for contentment for so...

I believe that - if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression - that you should take on this work like a holy calling.

Elizabeth Gilbert

expression writing believe

I feel like all this stuff that we make: books and art and music, all of it. There's this energy that circles the world that wants to be made manifest, and it is just looking for someone to come through. And it's dying for you to make it. And if you don't do it, it will go find somebody else.

Elizabeth Gilbert

circles book art

I want to have a lasting experience with God. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I loose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to leave in this world and enjoy its delights, but also elevate myself to God.

Elizabeth Gilbert

giving-up life religion

My life's accomplishments? Sanity, and you.

Elizabeth Gilbert

accomplishment love funny

So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.

Elizabeth Gilbert

light missing thinking

Attraversiamo (meaning "Lets cross over" in Italian)

Elizabeth Gilbert

italian crosses

Whatever this feeling is - this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to.

Elizabeth Gilbert

has-beens praying feelings

I was a writer before 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I'll be a writer after it's over. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Elizabeth Gilbert

eat-love-pray praying want

I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

Elizabeth Gilbert

long-ago fate destiny

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 might become if I'm not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz. The divorcee in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn't eat dairy but smokes menthols, who's always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergarteners and says things like, "Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I'll let you wear my mood ring.

Elizabeth Gilbert

crazy wine baby

If you want to get to the castle, Groceries, you've got to swim the moat.

Elizabeth Gilbert

moats castles swim

Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes.

Elizabeth Gilbert

italian husband sorry

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

wedding white dream

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

Elizabeth Gilbert

competition states struggle

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 human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.

Elizabeth Gilbert

balance light darkness

There's only one problem with the hero's journey, it never included women.

Elizabeth Gilbert

journey hero inspiring

The hero's journey is simply who we are as human beings.

Elizabeth Gilbert

journey hero inspiring

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 a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

Elizabeth Gilbert

emotional spiritual believe

Change is all about motion, motion is all about uncertainty and we are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Elizabeth Gilbert

uncertainty uncomfortable inspiring

They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. ... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.

Elizabeth Gilbert

guy loneliness depression

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.