Eat, Pray, Love

I loved reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Now, I am in search for her new book Committed.
The following are some of Elizabeth Gilbert's thoughts that I highlighted throughout Eat, Pray, Love. They are quoted below directly from the text with the chapter (or bead) number to indicate where you can find it. Her thoughts are EVEN BETTER when in the context of the chapter. A very good read! I recommend it! Now, I can go see the movie.

Say it like you eat it.

True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment. (4)

Could I have survived myself, by myself? I don’t know. That’s the think about 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. (17)

Perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. Not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation. (25)

Responsibility = the ability to respond. (30)

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection. (30)

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 silence of the heart. (45)

Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true. (46)

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, 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 newest 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. (49)

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 consequence. 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. We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses- one foot is on the horse called “fate,” the other on the horse called “free will.” And the question you have to ask every day is – which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort? (58)

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear everyday. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.” (58)

The rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame. As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff of it is bad for you. I mean, what kind of prayer is this to imbibe- “Give us this day our daily grudge”? You might just as well as hang it up and kiss God good-bye if you really need to keep blaming somebody else for your own life’s limitations. (60)