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Elizabeth Gilbert

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Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Inspirational
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
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?
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
My own sober dating plan is approximately three pages long, and it includes such items as “NO WEEKLONG FIRST DATES.” My plan also forbids me from texting obsessively between dates, dropping any existing plans or projects because of a new relationship, falling into fantasy with someone I have met in my travels (aka not in real life), moving virtual strangers into my home, trying to rescue unrecovered alcoholics or drug addicts; buying expensive gifts for new lovers; or sharing bank accounts with anyone, ever.

If all this sounds boring, or feels like it removes the spontaneity and intensity from romance, that is exactly the point. Spontaneity, for sex and love addicts, is exceedingly dangerous, and intensity is something I am wise to avoid.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
As a sex and love addict in recovery, I define a “clean day” as any day where I have not used another human being—not as a stimulant, or a sedative; not as a badge of honor or a bodyguard; not as an emotional support animal, a sleeping pill, a sex toy, a babysitter, a parental-replacement figure, or a good-looking trophy; not as some infinitely wise Delphic oracle who is here to answer all my most challenging life questions; and certainly not as a mirror that I can stare into, searching for evidence that I am lovable, attractive, worthy, normal, respectable, special, desirable, valuable, irreplaceable, adored, secure, or good.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t stay stopped; I kept doing that thing.
No matter how costly the consequences, I kept acting out. One disastrous encounter after another left me shattered, guilt-ridden, shamed, and exhausted. Lessons kept piling up, but I was never able to act differently, despite being a trustworthy and disciplined person in every other realm of my life.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on 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
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope
Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.
From City of Girls
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope, Inspirational
Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Death
Like all sex and love addicts, I can feel someone’s attention and attraction from a hundred yards away—hell, I can feel them from the other side of a continent.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
That goes for all addicts. We are all runaway trains—and nobody can stop us from acting upon our worst and wildest ideas, once we get started. Nothing can stop us but a miracle.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
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.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Funny
You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
One of the central characteristics of sex and love addicts is that we assign magical qualities to people, and then we become enraged when those people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I know the voice of God the way a blind, mewling, newborn kitten knows the smell of its mother.

The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power.

I stopped walking.
I listened harder.
I leaned into the sound of God, offering me wisdom and guidance.

That being the case, continued the voice, perhaps it’s time you called somebody and asked for help.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Image management” is something addicts care a lot about, and I am no exception.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Inspirational
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
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?
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
My own sober dating plan is approximately three pages long, and it includes such items as “NO WEEKLONG FIRST DATES.” My plan also forbids me from texting obsessively between dates, dropping any existing plans or projects because of a new relationship, falling into fantasy with someone I have met in my travels (aka not in real life), moving virtual strangers into my home, trying to rescue unrecovered alcoholics or drug addicts; buying expensive gifts for new lovers; or sharing bank accounts with anyone, ever.

If all this sounds boring, or feels like it removes the spontaneity and intensity from romance, that is exactly the point. Spontaneity, for sex and love addicts, is exceedingly dangerous, and intensity is something I am wise to avoid.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
As a sex and love addict in recovery, I define a “clean day” as any day where I have not used another human being—not as a stimulant, or a sedative; not as a badge of honor or a bodyguard; not as an emotional support animal, a sleeping pill, a sex toy, a babysitter, a parental-replacement figure, or a good-looking trophy; not as some infinitely wise Delphic oracle who is here to answer all my most challenging life questions; and certainly not as a mirror that I can stare into, searching for evidence that I am lovable, attractive, worthy, normal, respectable, special, desirable, valuable, irreplaceable, adored, secure, or good.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t stay stopped; I kept doing that thing.
No matter how costly the consequences, I kept acting out. One disastrous encounter after another left me shattered, guilt-ridden, shamed, and exhausted. Lessons kept piling up, but I was never able to act differently, despite being a trustworthy and disciplined person in every other realm of my life.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on 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
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope
Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.
From City of Girls
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope, Inspirational
Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Death
Like all sex and love addicts, I can feel someone’s attention and attraction from a hundred yards away—hell, I can feel them from the other side of a continent.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
That goes for all addicts. We are all runaway trains—and nobody can stop us from acting upon our worst and wildest ideas, once we get started. Nothing can stop us but a miracle.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
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.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Funny
You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
One of the central characteristics of sex and love addicts is that we assign magical qualities to people, and then we become enraged when those people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I know the voice of God the way a blind, mewling, newborn kitten knows the smell of its mother.

The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power.

I stopped walking.
I listened harder.
I leaned into the sound of God, offering me wisdom and guidance.

That being the case, continued the voice, perhaps it’s time you called somebody and asked for help.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Image management” is something addicts care a lot about, and I am no exception.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Inspirational
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
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?
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
My own sober dating plan is approximately three pages long, and it includes such items as “NO WEEKLONG FIRST DATES.” My plan also forbids me from texting obsessively between dates, dropping any existing plans or projects because of a new relationship, falling into fantasy with someone I have met in my travels (aka not in real life), moving virtual strangers into my home, trying to rescue unrecovered alcoholics or drug addicts; buying expensive gifts for new lovers; or sharing bank accounts with anyone, ever.

If all this sounds boring, or feels like it removes the spontaneity and intensity from romance, that is exactly the point. Spontaneity, for sex and love addicts, is exceedingly dangerous, and intensity is something I am wise to avoid.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
As a sex and love addict in recovery, I define a “clean day” as any day where I have not used another human being—not as a stimulant, or a sedative; not as a badge of honor or a bodyguard; not as an emotional support animal, a sleeping pill, a sex toy, a babysitter, a parental-replacement figure, or a good-looking trophy; not as some infinitely wise Delphic oracle who is here to answer all my most challenging life questions; and certainly not as a mirror that I can stare into, searching for evidence that I am lovable, attractive, worthy, normal, respectable, special, desirable, valuable, irreplaceable, adored, secure, or good.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t stay stopped; I kept doing that thing.
No matter how costly the consequences, I kept acting out. One disastrous encounter after another left me shattered, guilt-ridden, shamed, and exhausted. Lessons kept piling up, but I was never able to act differently, despite being a trustworthy and disciplined person in every other realm of my life.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on 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
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope
Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.
From City of Girls
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope, Inspirational
Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Death
Like all sex and love addicts, I can feel someone’s attention and attraction from a hundred yards away—hell, I can feel them from the other side of a continent.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
That goes for all addicts. We are all runaway trains—and nobody can stop us from acting upon our worst and wildest ideas, once we get started. Nothing can stop us but a miracle.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
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.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Funny
You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
One of the central characteristics of sex and love addicts is that we assign magical qualities to people, and then we become enraged when those people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I know the voice of God the way a blind, mewling, newborn kitten knows the smell of its mother.

The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power.

I stopped walking.
I listened harder.
I leaned into the sound of God, offering me wisdom and guidance.

That being the case, continued the voice, perhaps it’s time you called somebody and asked for help.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Image management” is something addicts care a lot about, and I am no exception.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
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