Summer reading in Montreal…thank you, Laurie!

IN HONOR OF RICHARD FROM TEXAS…and the difference between wishes and plans….

IN HONOR OF RICHARD FROM TEXAS…and the difference between wishes and plans.

There is perhaps no line in Eat Pray Love which seems to affect people more than this simple adage ("You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be") which my friend Richard from Texas told me one day in India, when I was mourning some sad episode of my past, and wishing it had turned out differently.

He turned my head around so hard with that line, it almost gave me whiplash — but the very best kind of whiplash (the kind of whiplash that wakes you up, and gives you a chance to choose to be powerful instead of tragic.)

A friend of this page named Aaron just made this gorgeous montage of that quote, and I wanted to share it all with you. THANK YOU, AARON!

Please be assured, dear ones, that I have nothing against wishes. But I have to vigilant with myself about what KIND of wishes I am making. I am allowed to make all kinds of wishes about the future (in wishes begin plans, after all, and in plans unfold our lives to come) but I am absolutely not allowed to make wishes about the past. Because I find that I can get trapped there, lost in a dream about something which is already over, desperate for some ending which can never occur. When I find myself doing that, wishing in the past, I hear Richard's voice saying to me firmly: "YOU ARE IN VIOLATION, GROCERIES!"

Then I straighten up my backbone, as he would've wanted me to, and I carry on.

FORWARD EVER, BACKWARD NEVER!
xo
Liz

via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall

HOLD IT TOGETHER, GILBERT! Here’s a video somebody just sent over. It’s me at…

HOLD IT TOGETHER, GILBERT! Here’s a video somebody just sent over. It’s me at…

HOLD IT TOGETHER, GILBERT!

Here's a video somebody just sent over. It's me at the recent BEA Conference in NYC, talking about my new book "The Signature of All Things."

OK, I was maybe just a TINY bit over-excited.

But this was the first time I had ever spoken about the novel in an official capacity. I also hadn't been out of the house much, the previous year, because I'd been all holed up writing. So I was a little extra thrilled about being out somewhere in clean clothes, with clean hair, talking to someone other than my cat. FORGIVE ME!

One of these days, I will learn how to play it more cool. But in the meantime…well, here it is!

And if you would like to pre-order the novel that has this novelist in the yellow dress blabbering so giddily, why you may do so right here:

https://www.elizabethgilbert.com/books/the-signature-of-all-things/

Olé!

Liz


Elizabeth Gilbert at BEA 2013
Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert stopped by the Penguin booth to talk about the success of Eat, Pray, Love and her upcoming novel, The Signature of All T…

via Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook Wall