Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

Judging by my degradation in the last 24 hours, I'll be surprised if I make it to Tuesday.

His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tortmented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short.

Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.

See, what you're meant to do when you have a mid-life crisis is buy a fast car, aren't you? Well, I've always had fast cars. It's not that. It's the fear that you're past your best. It's the fear that the stuff you've done in the past is your best work.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

How hard could it be? Is it really going to hurt? You get into that deep well of emotion if you are by yourself. Why am I here? What's the point of going on? If I can't do what I want to do, then what's the point?

I longed to be bright and most certainly never was. I was rather hopeless, I suspect.

I had a reporter ask me what it was like to have my best years over so soon. It stayed with me.

I had planned to accomplish something considerable, and this is the end.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

I'm a hopeless mother; a hopeless wife; I have to try harder. I'm just a pathetic case history, really.

Sometimes, because of my success, I am afraid that I was not a good father. With the first two I was too strong, and with the other three I was too weak.

I constantly think I'm a fraud - that this success is not warranted or justified.

God, I'm just a fat bald guy, 60 years old, singing the blues, you know?

You have people that know they have the talent, but sometimes they get scared when success is in their face.

I didn't handle success all that well.

A strange side effect of sudden success is the sense that if you can succeed in one field, then it might well be worth trying to succeed in another.

Let's face it, I'm a has-been.

There comes a time in every man's life when he wakes up drunk on the toilet and begins to doubt the choices he has made. and when that time comes at least twice a day, every day. something needs to be done.

There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

Most people, after one success, are so cringingly afraid of doing less well that they rub all the edge off their subsequent work.

How do you get up in the morning? Another wasted life it's so boring The system never failed you You failed yourself and all of your friends Now your heart is failing too A total system failure they pronounce you