Quotes from Eat, Pray, Love Worth Sharing

I just finished the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  It is a wonderful, eye-opening, spirit-opening, heart-opening book.  Plus, it’s funny.  I highly recommend reading it.  Here are a few examples of what I am talking about, taken straight from the book.  Click HERE to purchase the book from Amazon.com.

“When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz.  Learn your way around loneliness.  Make a map of it.  Sit with it, for once in your life.  Welcome to the human experience.  But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”

“I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful.”

“The truth is, I don’t think I’m good at meditation.  I can’t seem to get my mind to hold still.  I mentioned this once to an Indian monk, and he said, “It’s a pity you’re the only person in the history of the world who ever had this problem.”

“It’s all I can do not to jump out of this bed and call him from India in the middle of the night and just- I don’t know what- just hang up on him, probably.  Or beg him to love me again.  Or read him such a ferocious indictment on all his character flaws.”

“I have a new friend.  His name is Yudhi.  He’s Indonesian, originally from Java.  He is twenty-seven years old and talks kind of like a southern California surfer.  He calls me ‘man’ and ‘dude’ all the time.  The guy has a musical ear like maybe nobody I’ve ever met.  He’s got a smile that could stop crime, and he’s got a  long, complicated life story for somebody so young.  I wish he were famous.  If there were any fairness, he would be famous by now.  He says, ‘Dude- why is life all crazy like this?”

“The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphysical level because even in one lifetime it’s obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it.  This is the supreme lesson of karma (and of Western psychology, by the way)- take care of the problem now, or else you’ll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time.  And that repetition of suffering- that’s hell.  Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding- there’s where you’ll find heaven.”