“at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“When women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all. After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain - yet somehow, still, we carry on.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, Vivian—squander it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right—not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The field of honor is a painful field...(It) is not a place where children can play. Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person - a person without honor - might take. Such an instance may hurt, but that's why honor is a painful field.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“If you're a coward--and let's just say that you are, for the sake of argument--it means nothing. My Aunt Peg, she's an alcoholic. She can't handle drinking. It ruins her life and turns her into a mess--and do you know what that means? It means nothing. Do you think it makes her a bad person? Of course not--it's just the way she is. Alcoholism just happened to her, Frank. Things happen to people. We are the way we are--there's nothing to be done for it. My Uncle Billy--he couldn't keep a promise or stay faithful to a woman. It meant nothing. He was a wonderful person, Frank, and he was completely untrustworthy. It's just how he was. It didn't mean anything. We all still loved him.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Anyway, at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The secret to falling in love so fast, of course, is not to know the person at all. You just need to identify one exciting feature about them, and then you hurl your heart at that one feature, with full force, trusting that this will be enough of a foundation for lasting devotion.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Not many people know how to be satisfied.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“When we are young, Angela, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right - not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either. In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“After a certain age, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you’re always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Somone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there's no war, and then there's another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person—and where's the good in that?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere - wherever people are living out their lives. It's a city with a million centers.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“This is what I've found about life, as I've gotten older: you start to lose people, Angela. It's not that there is ever a shortage of people - oh, heavens no. It is merely that - as the years pass - there comes to be a shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history. Those people start to be plucked away by death, and they are awfully hard to replace after they go.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“I could have spent the rest of my life trying to prove that I was a good girl - but that would have been unfaithful to who I really was. I believed that I was a good person, if not a good girl. But my appetites were what they were. So I gave up on the idea of denying myself what I truly wanted. Then I sought ways to delight myself. As long as I stayed away from married men, I felt that I was doing no harm.
Anyway, at some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.
After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“I always hated hearing old people yammering on like this when I was young. And I do what to assure you: I'm aware that many thing were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted. a”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz)...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I’ve always witnessed.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“I only meant that there was a place within my imagination so fathomlessly deep that the light of the real world could never touch it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“I was not one for telling the truth back then. Truth telling was not my first instinct in any situation - especially in stressful situations. It took my many years to become an honest person, and I know why: because the truth is often terrifying. Once you introduce truth into a room, the room may never be the same again.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls