Bookish Mardi : Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
"Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighted."
"Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighted."
Book Summary
In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want--husband, country home, successful career--but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and of what she found in their place. Following a divorce and a crushing depression, Gilbert set out to examine three different aspects of her nature, set against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. ( Source: Wikipedia)
Remarkable Lines from the Book:
"Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit."
"We had the eyes of refugees."
". . .there are always two figures in marriage, after all - two votes, two opinions, two conflicting sets of decision, desires and limitations."
"The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only impossible than staying was leaving."
". . .when I pray I do not address my prayers to The Universe, The Great Void, The Force, The Supreme Self, The Whole, The Creator, The Light, The High Power, or even the most poetic manifestation of God's name."
". . .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."
"God is an experience of supreme love."
"I believe in a magnificent God."
"True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment."
"Things were going to get a lot worse before they got worse." - Lily Tomlin
"If you really want to get to know someone,you have to divorce him."
"We invented our own language. We went on day trips and road trips. We hiked to the top of the world we would to take together."
"Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story?"
"But why must everything always have a practical application?"
"To find the balance you want. . . you must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth like it's like you have your four legs, instead of two. 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."
"God is not merely a blinding a vision of a glorious light, but He is, most of all, l'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle . . . The love that moves the sun and the stars."
"That's the thing about a human life - there's no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.'
"Experiences teaches us that the world is no misery."
"Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend."
"Humor is hard to catch in a second language."
"I've been screwed and sued and tattooed, and I'm still standin' here in front of you."
"Americans don't really know how to do nothing."
"We are the masters of il bel far niente . . .the beauty of doing nothing."
"The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. There's another wonderful Italian expression: l'arte d'arrangiarsi - the art of making something out of nothing."
"To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place right?"
Liz: ". . . deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate in a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope."
Giovanni: So sadness is a place?
Liz: Sometimes people live there for years.
". . . 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.' - Liz
"Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough - but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. . . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation." - Augusteum
"Who amongst us lives without sacrifice?" - Liz
"Beauty attracts beauty." - Liz
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"Admittedly, I am nit the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help myself." - Liz
"Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn - what is the word of the street." - Giulio
"I am grateful for old and new friends." - Liz
"Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is." - Goethe
"No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws when its citizens. . . do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love." - Plato
"To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business - not always necessarily means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to real when everything else is flaking away into. . .rhetoric and plot." - Liz
"The world is unkind and unfair." - Liz
"You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight." - Liz
"The hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world." - Liz
"If you take away perfect from the perfect, the perfect remains." - Liz
"Unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's need." - Freudians
"We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and morality." - Yogis
". . .a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur." - Liz
"You are what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions." - Liz
". . . you should neber give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead." - Liz
"Be careful what you pray for, cuz you just might get it." - Richard
"The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the heart. That's where you need to go."- Richard.
"Once the troublesome mind begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work." - St. Teresa of Avila
"There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whisky and the Book of Common Prayer." - Liz
"Most of humanit have eyes that are so caked shut with dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them. A few other are so naturally clear-eyed and calm ready that they no instruction or assistance whatsoever." - Richard
"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." - Old Lady
"The most fierce experiences come when I let go of some last fearful reserve and permit a veritable tubine of energy to unleash itself up my spine." - Liz
"Time gets screwy in this thunderous space." - Liz
"If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you." - Liz
"In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust ourselves around discomfort - physical, emotional and psuchological - in order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything does eventually pass." - Vipassana
"The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world. In other words: Get used to it." - Buddhist Teaching
"We are to become scientists of our own inner experience." - Guru
"The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order." - Liz
"We are to become scientists of our own inner experience." - Liz
"Dear saint - please, please, please. . . give the grace to win the lottery.
My son - please, please, please. . . buy a ticket." - Liz
"Prayer is a relationship."
"What worked yesterday doesn't always work today." - Liz
. . .is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-support. Half of it you have to control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands, and your actions will show measureable consequence. Man is neither entirely a puppet of gods, nor he is entirely the captain of his own destiny; he's a little of both." - Liz
". . . all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people." - Liz
"The search for contentment, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world." - Liz
"Heaven is love." - Ketut Liyer
"Why does suffering never end?" - Wayan
"This is a world full of untold suffering and war and that everyone is in need right now, but what are we to do?" - Liz
"It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is the absolute value of human emotion- joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma; dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing." - Liz
"Women should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry." - Liz
"Everybody has a different sense of urgency." Liz
". . . all the pain of human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash." - Liz
". . . in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils." - Liz
"I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." - Liz
"We are the masters of il bel far niente . . .the beauty of doing nothing."
"The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. There's another wonderful Italian expression: l'arte d'arrangiarsi - the art of making something out of nothing."
"To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place right?"
Liz: ". . . deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate in a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope."
Giovanni: So sadness is a place?
Liz: Sometimes people live there for years.
". . . 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.' - Liz
"Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough - but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. . . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation." - Augusteum
 |
| ". . .longing to travel while you are already travelling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness." |
"Who amongst us lives without sacrifice?" - Liz
"Beauty attracts beauty." - Liz
 |
| ". . . it is better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly." - Liz |
"Admittedly, I am nit the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help myself." - Liz
"Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn - what is the word of the street." - Giulio
"I am grateful for old and new friends." - Liz
"Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is." - Goethe
"No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws when its citizens. . . do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love." - Plato
"In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real." - Liz
"The world is unkind and unfair." - Liz
 |
| "The appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one's humanity." - Liz |
"The hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world." - Liz
"If you take away perfect from the perfect, the perfect remains." - Liz
"Unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's need." - Freudians
"We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and morality." - Yogis
". . .a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur." - Liz
 |
| "Our whole business therefore in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen." - Liz |
 |
| "The mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind." |
"You are what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions." - Liz
 |
". . . you should neber give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead." - Liz
"Be careful what you pray for, cuz you just might get it." - Richard
"The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the heart. That's where you need to go."- Richard.
"Once the troublesome mind begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work." - St. Teresa of Avila
 |
| "People think that a soulmate is a perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soulmate is a mirror, the person that shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soulmate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear you down your walls and smack you awake. . . Soulmates, they come to your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave." - Richard |
"There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whisky and the Book of Common Prayer." - Liz
"Most of humanit have eyes that are so caked shut with dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them. A few other are so naturally clear-eyed and calm ready that they no instruction or assistance whatsoever." - Richard
 |
| "Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining once county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newset search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you." - Richard |
 |
| "Leeting go, of course, is a scary enterprise for those of us who believe that the world revolves only because it has a handle on top of it which we personally turn, and if we were to drop this handle for even a moment, well - that would be the end of the universe. Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens next. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. Life continues to go on." - Richard |
"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." - Old Lady
"The most fierce experiences come when I let go of some last fearful reserve and permit a veritable tubine of energy to unleash itself up my spine." - Liz
"Time gets screwy in this thunderous space." - Liz
"If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you." - Liz
"In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust ourselves around discomfort - physical, emotional and psuchological - in order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything does eventually pass." - Vipassana
"The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world. In other words: Get used to it." - Buddhist Teaching
"We are to become scientists of our own inner experience." - Guru
"The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order." - Liz
"We are to become scientists of our own inner experience." - Liz
"Dear saint - please, please, please. . . give the grace to win the lottery.
My son - please, please, please. . . buy a ticket." - Liz
"Prayer is a relationship."
"What worked yesterday doesn't always work today." - Liz
"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction.There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increases my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I can spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and amoney and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can shoose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my lif - whether I will see them as curses or oppotuinites ( and on the ocassions when I can't rise the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook.) I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts." - Liz
"It is beneficial to walk on the grass in the morning when the dew has already been accumulated, for it lowers naturally and pleasantly the body temperature." - Tulsi
"I see marriage as an operation that sews two people together, and divorce is a kind of amputation that can take a long time to heal. The longer you were married, or rougher the amputation, the harder it is to recover." - Plumber/Poet from NZ
"Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it my dear." - Nun
"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." - Liz
". . .all your worries will be waiting for you at the door upon you exit, should you care pick it up again when you leave." - Richard
"Sometimes the best way to get over someon is to get under someone else." - Richard
"Learninghow to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the worlds with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace, and bliss." - Liz
"The wise man is always similar to himself." - Sextus
"All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop." - Kabir
"God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worhip - just as long as those prayers are sincere." - Yogic Scripture
"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" - Upanishads
"To meditate, only you must smile." - Ketut Liyer
"Man is a demon, man is a god." Ketut Liyer
". . . human beings are born with the equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equallt present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth the virtues or the malevolence." - Indian Guru
". . . all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people." - Liz
"The search for contentment, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world." - Liz
"Heaven is love." - Ketut Liyer
"Why does suffering never end?" - Wayan
"This is a world full of untold suffering and war and that everyone is in need right now, but what are we to do?" - Liz
 |
| ". . .is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart . It means we have tried for something." - Richard |
"It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is the absolute value of human emotion- joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma; dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing." - Liz
"Women should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry." - Liz
"Everybody has a different sense of urgency." Liz
". . . all the pain of human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash." - Liz
". . . in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils." - Liz
"I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." - Liz
Thanks and keep updated! ^_^
(c) to all owners of the photos I used *_*
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