• "God is an experience of supreme love." 14
• "True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment." 16
• "The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?....I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence--the dual glories of a human life. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful....both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish. " 29
• "Where did you get the idea you aren't allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You're a constituent – you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So put your opinion out there. Make your case. believe me – it will at least be taken into consideration." 32
• That's the thing about human life--there's no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
• "Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the sense stronger in Italy than anywhere else in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent "opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors . . ." In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real." 114
• Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.
• "We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. The kundalini shakti--the supreme energy of the divine--will take you there....According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life, this is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile--just for the chance to experience this infinite love. and once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can...bliss." 197
• "All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop." Kabir, 199
• You may return here once you have fully come to realize that you are always here. 200
• My body felt so alive and healthy from all these months of Yoga and vegetarian food and early bedtimes. 203
• The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweler. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar. ...You can still live on that shimmering line between your old thinking and your new understanding, always in a state of learning. In the figurative sense, this is a border that is always moving--as you advance in your studies and realizations, that mysterious forest of the unknown always stays a few feet ahead of you, so you have to travel light in order to keep following it. You have to stay mobile, movable, supple. Slippery, even. 204
• Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline. Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals, and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship--just so long as those prayers are sincere. 206
• The Upanishads suggest that so-called chaos may have an actual divine function, even if you personally can't recognize it now: "The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident." The best we can do, then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally--no matter what insanity is transpiring out there. 206
• "Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine," he said. "You want to stay near the core of the thing - right in the hub of the wheel - not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you'll always find peace." 207
• "I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments." 260
• "all the sorrow and trouble of this world [her friend Darcey tells her] is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people." 260
• The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one's lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of Karma (and of western psychology by the way)--take care of the problems now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering--that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding--there's where you'll find your heaven. 262
• The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras. 325
• On my ninth day of silence, I went into meditation one evening on the beach as the sun was going down and I didn't stand up again until after midnight. I remember thinking, “This is it, Liz" I said to my mind, "This is your chance. Show me everything that is causing you sorrow. Let me see all of it. Don't hold anything back." One by one, the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves. I looked at each thought, at each unit of sorrow, and 1 acknowledged its existence and felt (without trying to protect myself from it) it’s horrible pain. And then I would tell that sorrow, "It's OK I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. It's over." I would actually feel the sorrow (as if it were a living thing) enter my heart (as if it were an actual room). Then 1 would say, "Next?" and the next bit of grief would surface. I would regard it, experience it, bless it, and invite it into my heart, too. I did this with every sorrowful thought I'd ever had-reaching back into year of memory until nothing was left.

Then I said to my mind, "Show me your anger now." One by one, my life's every incident of anger rose and made itself known. Every injustice, every betrayal, every loss, every rage. I saw them all, one by one, andI acknowledged their existence. I felt each piece of anger completely, as if it were happening for the first time, and then I would say, "Come into my heart now. You can rest there. It's safenow. It's over. I love you." This went on for hours, and I swung between these mighty poles of opposite feelings-experiencing my anger thoroughly for one bone-rattling moment, and thenexperiencing a total coolness, as the anger entered my heart as if through a door, laid itself down, curled up against its brothers and gave up fighting. Then came the most difficult part. "Show me your shame," I asked my mind. Dear God, the horrors that I saw then. A pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance. I didn't blink from any of it, though. "Show me your worst," I said. When I tried to invite these units of shame into my heart, they each hesitated at the door, saying, "No-you don't want me in there ... don't you know what I did?" and I would say, "I do want you. Even you. I do. Even you are welcome here. Its OK. You are forgiven. You are part of me. You can rest now. It's over." When all this was finished, I was empty. Nothing was fighting in my mind anymore. I looked into my heart, at my own goodness, and I saw its capacity. I saw that my heart was not even nearly full, not even after having taken in and tended to all those calamitous urchins of sorrow and anger and shame; my heart could easily have received and forgiven even more. Its love was infinite. I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in oyr own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine--imagine!--what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept. 328

• "My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which growns into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well - the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me- I mean, this happy and balanced me, who is now dozing on the deck of the small Indonesian fishing boat-who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years. The younger me was the acorn full of potential, but it was the older me, the already-existent oak, who was saying the whole time-'Yes-grow! Change! Evolve!Come and meet me here, where I already exist in wholeness and maturity! I need you to grow into me!' And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl's ear, 'Go back to bed, Liz...' Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me." 329

• I love you. I will never leave you. I will always take care of you. -Liz Gilbert
• Smile in your liver -Ketut Liyer
• Same in end, so better to be happy on journey -Ketut Liyer
• Attraversiamo = let's cross over
• http://ozip-magazine.com/?p=612
• http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Spiritual-Journeys-Inspired-by-Eat-Pray-Love