Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes & Sayings (Page 6)

“I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding.”

“What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced, it's that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can't wait too long. It's the single simplest measure to predict divorce.”

“There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.”

“Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'”

“There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.”

“I have a rigid self-accountability. You have to work hard.”

“Men go into marriage with virtually no expectations whatsoever. Ten years later, the men are delightfully surprised to find out that it's actually kind of nice, and the women have sort of had to take a nose dive from what they thought it was going to be.”

“Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold.”

“When somebody has an enormous success in this culture, people start asking two questions, which are 'What are you doing now?' and 'How are you going to beat that?' And I have to say, I love the assumption that your intention is to beat yourself constantly - that you're in battle against yourself.”

“You know, why at the end of your life should you assemble thousands of pages of 'Why am I so sad, why am I so depressed?' Instead, assemble thousands of pages of why you're so content.”