Great Throughts Treasury

"Creative people always suffer from depression because we're so super sensitive and special?" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don’t speak very strictly. To those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt feelings and now excuse myself from their business. Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed—much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love. In every religious tradition on earth, there have always been mystical saints and transcendents who report exactly this experience. Unfortunately many of them have ended up arrested and killed. Still, I think very highly of them. In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It’s like this—I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, What kind of dog is that? I would always give the same answer: She’s a brown dog. Similarly, when the question is raised, What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"He was playing a character I had invented, which is somewhat telling. In desperate love, it's always like this, isn't it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"How much do you love me?' and Who's in charge? ....these two questions of LOVE and CONTROL undo us ALL, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering. People follow different paths, straight or crooked, according to their temperament, depending on which they consider best, or most appropriate -- and all reach You, just as rivers enter the ocean." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I agree--the world isn't a nursery. But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust—thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I became one of those annoying people who always say Ciao! Only I was extra annoying, since I would always explain where the word ciao comes from. (If you must know, it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval Venetians as an intimate salutation: Sono il suo schiavo! Meaning: I am your slave!) Just speaking these words made me feel sexy and happy. My divorce lawyer told me not to worry; she said she had one client (Korean by heritage) who, after a yucky divorce, legally changed her name to something Italian, just to feel sexy and happy again." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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 before I left, do you have friends [there]?’ and I would just shake my head no, thinking to myself, But I will." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine—just imagine!—what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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 enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I told him: Maybe you could come to visit me in America someday, Ketut. Navia and shook his head cheerfully resigned to capacity: I cannot Liz, I do not have enough teeth to travel by plane" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"In the end, what i have come to believe about God is simple. It's like this - I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, What kind of dog is that? I would always give the same answer: She's a brown dog. Similarly, when the question is raised, What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"It was the Senator's opinion that a good, peppery chicken soup could cure anything, even childbirth, so he cooked up a nice batch for Stanley Thomas's wife." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: I want a spiritual teacher." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Oh Krishna's mind concern, rough, strong and stubborn, and subjected to at least the difficulty of for subjecting the wind" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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 ever desired something and then didn't get it (or, worse, got it and subsequently lost it) know full well the suffering of which the Buddah spoke. Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody - really want him - it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause you lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain the object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such primal urgency, you no longer completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own yearnings." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution)." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"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." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"You have no idea how strong my love is!" - Elizabeth Gilbert

"You know, it's a funny thing. The only Romance language Felipe doesn't happen to speak is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we're about to jump." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Your tears are my prayers." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one." - Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall

"I play the Demon myself -- no puppets involved." - Elizabeth Kenny

"I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?" - Elizabeth Lesser

"One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'" - Elizabeth Lesser

"The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"I think he and I should get married!" - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"You lawyers are so nice and precise in shifting and scanning every word and letter that many times you stand more upon form than matter, upon syllables than the sense of the law." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"Grief is the price we pay for love." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in this treasure house, the Bible?" - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

"But you will imagine that it is best that He should at once enable you to see clearly. If it is, you may be sure He will do it. He never makes mistakes. But He often deals far differently with His disciples. He lets them grope their way in the dark until they fully learn how blind they are, how helpless, how absolutely in need of Him. What His methods will be with you I cannot foretell. But you may be sure that He never works in an arbitrary way. He has a reason for everything He does. You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His every act." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

"A poor original is better than a good imitation." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Change is the watchword of progression. When we tire of well-worn ways, we seek for new. This restless craving in the souls of men spurs them to climb, and to seek the mountain view." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate; As the voyage along thru life; 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to them. Once the chorus of cultural values was full of ministers, teachers, neighbors, leaders. They demanded more conformity, but offered more support. Now the messengers are violent cartoon characters, rappers and celebrities selling sneakers. Parents are considered "responsible" only if they are successful in their resistance. That's what makes child-raising harder. It's not just that American families have less time with their kids; it's that we have to spend more of this time doing battle with our own culture." - Ellen Goodman

"Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable." - Ellen Goodman

"I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box." - Ellen Goodman

"My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become THE imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test." - Ellen Goodman

"The world [in 2003] seemed to divide between international fundamentalists who want to keep women veiled and Internet spammers who want to unveil them on your computer screen." - Ellen Goodman

"We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?" - Ellen Goodman

"God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read." - Dorothy Parker