22 Very Sensible Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes On Love And Heartbreak
“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
“A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.”
“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody – really want him – it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.”
“Every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world – that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.”
“Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.”
“One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else’s body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn’t there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient’s body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: “Do you want your belly pressed against this person’s belly forever — or not?”
“To be fully seen by somebody… and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
“There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.”
“The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: “Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.”
“Love renders all of our plans and all of our hopes a gamble.”
“By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later – again, for its own mysterious reasons.”
“The act of quiet night-time talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.”
“Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.”
“Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.”
“Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody – so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?”
“Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.”
“A woman’s place is in the kitchen…sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner.”
“Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.”
“Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.”
“When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.”
“This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.”