Eat, Pray, Love

-by Elizabeth Gilbert

If you can read through this entry, thank you, and go pick up the book.

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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." (pg. 277)

"There is so much of my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction...I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life - whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook)...And most of all, I can choose my thoughts." (pg. 177)

"I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments - they run you down in the end. 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 one county or one room ahead of you...you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you." (pg. 155)

"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." (pg. 260)

"I tell her how she has to let go, man, how she's gotta learn that everything is just perfect as it is already, that the universe provides, baby." (pg. 297)

"Sex is funny...Make people do funny things...at the beginning of love. Wanting too much happiness, to much pleasure, until you make yourself sick. Lose balance...To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life." (pg. 298)

"...all the pain of a 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. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure...) and we become monuments to them. " (pg. 325)

"After all, baby, remember what they say - sometimes the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else." (pg. 189)

"I knew that i was not finished for good, that my anger, my sadness and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart, and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until I slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do." (pg. 328)

"You ego's job isn't to serve you. Its only job is to keep itself in power...So your ego's fighting for its life, playing with your mind, trying to assert its authority, trying to keep you cornered off in a holding pen away from the rest of the universe. Don't listen to it." (pg. 140)

"And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin' her way" (pg. 151)

"You make some big grandiose decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself." (pg. 191)

"Over the centuries, people have tried to hold on to that state of blissful perfection through all sorts of external means - through drugs and sex and power and adrenaline and the accumulation of pretty things - but it doesn't keep. We search for happiness everywhere...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." (pg. 197)

"The other objective of religion, of course, is to try to make sense of our chaotic world and explain the inexplicabilities we see playing our here on earth every day: the innocent suffer, the wicked are rewarded - what are we to make of all this? ... The best we can do, then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally - no matter what insanity is transpiring out there." (pg. 206)

This is for Kuya Charlton: "Traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt...to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal an constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby - I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine." (pg. 41)

"But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time - everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas present for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else." (pg. 65)

"He says all Americans are like this: repressed. Which makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they do blow up." (pg. 58)

"My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace...Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too - but who amongst us lives without sacrifice? And the question now for me is, What are my choices to be? What do I believe that i deserve in this life? Where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not?" (pg. 83)

"To find the balance you want...you must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 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." (pg. 27)

"[Heaven is] Beautiful. Everything beautiful is there. Every person beautiful is there. Everything beautiful to eat is there. Everything is love there. Heaven is love." (pg. 261)

"Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism." (pg. 285)

"Different school of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering's to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs...The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we thinking that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have filed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exits a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine." (pg. 122)

"Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise...The Yogis believe 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. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral - they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance." (pg. 122-123)

"You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment...If you're looking for union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirling is a problem. There's a reason they call God a presence- because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time." (pg. 132)

"Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine...Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands, and your actions will show measurable consequences. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his own destiny; he's a little of both." (pg. 177)

"Beauty attracts beauty." (pg. 85)

"Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted - an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Son you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore - despite the fact you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free)." (pg. 20-21)

"Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But...we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes...Americans don't really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype - the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax." (pg. 61)