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"I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work - one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves."
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"With Fellini, the fear dropped out of my work because it was such a happy experience... hanging out with Fellini, having pasta on the set with Fellini, and going out with Fellini!"
"I really do hope that the Millennium Summit gives new impetus to the work of the United Nations."
"The rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections."
"Anytime we can take narcotics off the street it is significant because it takes them out of the hands of children. It certainly is not going to stop the drug problem, we have to work very, very hard."
"There are no shortcuts to victory. We must commit ourselves to the slow, painstaking work of foreign policy day by day and year by year."
"Give a typical employee a million, and, he is most likely to use the money to print his CV on fancier paper."
"For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work."
"You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors."
Explore more quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert
"Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes."
"Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you're gonna wear 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. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can't learn to master your thinking, you're in deep trouble forever."
"I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding."
"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."
"I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume."
"I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days."
"Because what my gradmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle of life: They gave."
"Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that--whatever the outcome--you have traveled a noble path."
"I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives."
"Which is - you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right?"
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