Great Throughts Treasury

"How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn't it? reunited with fresh hopes, we'd share a few deliriously happy days together. Or sometimes even weeks." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say-- no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art." - Emile Zola

"A clean hand wants no washing." - English Proverbs

"To wear one's heart upon one's sleeve." - English Proverbs

"I am so in love with you that there isnÂ’t anything else." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"A necklace of pearls on a white neck. We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down... the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

"Instruction for life: Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk. When you lose, don't lose the lesson." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence." - Hannah Arendt

"All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But... I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey raincurtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien