Missing my Fairchild "Book Club" and excuse to walk down the
street and enjoy a girls night in with good food and great women. We
read quite a few books together, some winners, some losers.
This was obviously a winner.
Here are
Some favorite parts of Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert....
which I have now read 3 times.
Hopefully
I am not in some copyright breach here, by writing all of this, but I
am referencing page numbers, and all...trying to reference correctly.
Thanks Liz...
You have my gratitude for this book...entirely.
Every time I read it, I get something new and powerful.
This go-round....no exception.
"Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need
to be certain it's what you want before you commit." (10)
In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It's like
this---I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound.
She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have
inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people
asked me, "What kind of dog is that?" I would always give the same
answer: "She's a brown dog." Similarly, when the question is raised,
"What kind of God do you believe in?" my answer is easy: "I believe in a
magnificent God." (14)
A sad-faced Russian woman
tells us she's treating herself to Italian lessons because "I think I
deserve something beautiful." (44)
Giovanni's
sweetness, in my opinion, makes him a national treasure of Italy. He
endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was
getting frustrated with my inability to find words I wanted in Italian,
and he put his hand on my arm and said, "Liz, you must be very polite
with yourself when you are learning something new." (56)
When I get lonely these days, I think:
So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it.
Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.
But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching
post for your own unfulfilled yearnings. (65)
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 senses stronger in Italy than anywhere 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)
I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my
body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and
read and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate
circumstances in my life--- whether I will see them as curses or
opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most
optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too damn sorry for myself, I
can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words
and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I
can choose my thoughts. (177)
God isn't interested in
watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply
with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or
behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we
have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to
renounce our individuality. ...... Always wanted to be the quiet
girl. Probably precisely because I'm not. It's the same reason I think
that thick, dark hair is so beautiful---precisely because I don't have
it. But at some point you have to make your peace with what you were
given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He
would have made me that way, but He didn't. Useful, then, might be to
accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein. (192)
If you haven't read it yet...you may want to ask Santa...
XO, A
