Creativity asks you to enter realms with uncertain outcomes. People want to create a safe life for themselves so they try to live without fear and they end up killing their creativity in the process.
Elizabeth GilbertThat competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.
Elizabeth GilbertI'm so excited about school. I'm such a shameless student. I laid my clothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my patent leather shoes and my new lunch box. I hope the teacher will like me :)
Elizabeth GilbertWe invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
Elizabeth GilbertMy mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive-a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too-but who amongst us lives without sacrifice?
Elizabeth GilbertThe great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?
Elizabeth Gilbert