Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

every heart has its graveyard.

I spent half my life being hurt. The leftovers of hurt are an automatic gesture, like a dog that salivates.

For most of my life, I believed that my father had broken many of my bones. They were emotional and psychological bones; things no one could see, things that caused me to limp through life clutching for and holding on to people and situations that often rendered me immobile.

We're all struggling to get out of the past. We see something that reminds us of something, and then we bring our baggage into the present. Then we project it onto people constantly.

There are people in your past that you can't shake free from no matter how hard you tried. There's a certain process that you have to go through to say goodbye. That fire doesn't get extinguished. You have to put a gun to it.

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.

It is one of the ironies of my life and in many lives that whenever you are the happiest, all of this stuff from the past will come pushing up and demand to be noticed.

Thematically, I like playing with the ideas of stuff that you try to bury, and you think will go away, but instead you carry it with you until it becomes crippling. And sometimes you have to look back and deal with some stuff in order to truly move forward.

It's not easy to talk about things that are still hurting.

I don't want to keep talking about my upbringing because people always resort to the past and what happened when I was younger.

If you don't work through the things that haunt you early, they'll stay with you for the rest of your life.

Funny how internal scars never healed. They were the souvenirs of the past.

Hoarding one's hurts hurts only the hoarder.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

Forgiveness isn’t my best thing. Easier staying pissed. But I’m tired of being pissed all the time. Tired of feeling hurt by stuff that can never be fixed because it is an indelible part of the past.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

But a wound unfelt is a wound unhealed.

I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.

You know, those kinds of things in your life...movies you try to work out your issues, then you realize those kinds of traumatic issues just stay with you forever and they just keep reoccurring, and no matter how hard I try to get them out of my head, they just sort of stay there.

Until you make peace with your difficult memories, that pain will continue to bleed into your current and future experiences.

If you don't make peace with your past it will keep showing up in your present.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.

The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.