Elizabeth Gilbert - The Signature of All Things (2013)

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To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.

Elizabeth Gilbert
What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely....Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones.... It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.

Elizabeth Gilbert
You are still young, so you think only of your own self. You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish... But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering-no matter what you think of them and their supposed good fortune.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.

Elizabeth Gilbert
The whole sphere of air that surrounds us, Alma, is alive with invisible attractions — electric, magnetic, fiery and thoughtful. There is a universal sympathy all around us… When we cease all argument and debate — both internal and external — our true questions can be heard and answered…That is the gathering of magic.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?

Elizabeth Gilbert
Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean's surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms..."what language did the mermaid speak?" Alma wanted to know, imagining that it like almost have to be Greek. "English!" Henry said. "By God, plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?

Elizabeth Gilbert
That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

Elizabeth Gilbert
To show a longing for anything that one cannot have, for instance, is not a clever position.

Elizabeth Gilbert
There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

Elizabeth Gilbert
I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent — and working at a pace so slow — that I would be able to hear myself living.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos-the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path. Nobody stopped her. She was a comet. She did not know that she was not flying.

Elizabeth Gilbert
The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.

Elizabeth Gilbert
It used to be that god was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.

Elizabeth Gilbert
You can butcher the sheep only once. But if you are careful, you can shear the sheep every year.

Elizabeth Gilbert
This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life- that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!

Elizabeth Gilbert
Everything was a miracle until we solved it.... the first man who ever saw a flying fish probably thought he was witnessing a miracle — and the first man who ever described a flying fish was doubtless called a liar.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone; scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil.

Elizabeth Gilbert
The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

Elizabeth Gilbert