Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

No matter how far back you cut a willow tree, it will never really die.

If there's any lesson I've learned in the last five years, it's don't be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.

Life and business is like the changing seasons. You cannot change the seasons, but you can change yourself. Therein lies the opportunity to live an extraordinary life, the opportunity to change yourself.

No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps, and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.... That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots - but you have to play the ball where it lies.

When your life has been spent in one war after another for forty-five years, you have to be pretty handy to survive.

Yet seldom do they fail of their seed, And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us.

The same wind blows on us all. The economic wind, the social wind, the political wind. The same wind blows on everybody. The difference in where you arrive in one year, three years, five years, the difference in arrival is not the blowing of the wind but the set of the sail.

I've been coming back like a rubber ball for years.

One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.

The third guy was different. He was what you got when you ate squirrels for four generations. Smarter than a rat and tougher than a goat, and jumpier than either one.

If someone puts you in front of a 30m high wall, tells you to get over it, and then comes back two years later and you're still there, you've made no progress. You should find another wall.

You don't have the game you played last year or last week. You only have today's game. It may be far from your best, but that's all you've got. Harden your heart and make the best of it.

The answer doesn't lie in learning how to protect ourselves from life-it lies in learning how to become strong enough to let a bit more of it in.

Getting back in the directors chair - there's a sense of like doing something every year. It's not like riding a bike, you're always learning new things, you're gonna face new challenges and when you face new challenges you'll have an answer for them.

Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.

Embrace failure. Never never quit. Get very comfortable with that uneasy feeling of going against the grain and trying something new. It will constantly take you places you never thought you could go. This has been my mantra for years. I always remember I won't do things right on the first try. So failure is mandatory for success!

Adaptation is one of the great advantages to being born and bred in Jersey. We're simply not bested by bad air or tainted water. We're like that catfish with lungs. Take us out of our environment and we can grow whatever body parts we need to survive. After Jersey the rest of the country's a piece of cake. You want to send someone into a fallout zone? Get him from Jersey. He'll be fine.

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.

Rise O fallen fighters, rise and take your stance again, He who fight and run away, Live to fight another day

If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!

When we feel weak, all we have to do is wait a little while. The spring returns and the winter snows melt and fill us with new energy.