Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, LoveBloomsbury Publishing It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby - and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance.More... It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby - and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her. |
Someday you`re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You`ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing...
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We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.
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I`m here. I love you. I don`t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. [...] There`s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you.
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You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
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Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.
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We don`t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.
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I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, "There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who`s in charge?"
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We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy`s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure - your perfection - is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.
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Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.
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Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can`t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I`m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don`t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.
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When you`re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you`ve just wandered a few feet off the path, that you`ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and its time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you dont even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
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There`s no trouble in this world so serious that it can`t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.
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