Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

"But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen."

"Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue."

"Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope"

"The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident."

"Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table."

"You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. 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."

"I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light."

"In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work …"

"Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there."

"I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water."

"You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be."

"نصف فائدة السجود تتمثل في الطلب بحدّ ذاته ، في النية السليمة الواضحة ."

"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."

"In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work …"

"The day is ending. It's time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, Let go."

"True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer."

"All I could say was, "I don't know what to do."I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, "Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth."

"You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."

"Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."

"Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."