Eat, Pray, Love

Just a few of my millions of favorite passages.....

"To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life." p.298

"What I mostly remember about that night is the billowy white mosquito netting that surrounded us. How it looked to me like a parachute. And how I felt like I was now deploying this parachute to escort me out the side exit of the solid, disciplined airplane which had been flying me during these few years out of A Very Hard Time in My Life. But now my sturdy flying machine had become obsolete right there in midair, so I stepped out of that single minded single engine airplane and let this fluttering white parachute swing me down through the strange empty atmosphere between my past ad my future, and land me safely on this small, bed-shaped island, inhabited only by this handsome shipwrecked Brazilian sailor, who (having been alone himself for far too long) was so happy and so surprised to see me coming that he suddenly forgot all his english and could only manage to repeat these five words every time he looked at my face: beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful and beautiful." p.288

"If I am to truly becomem an autonomous woman, then I must take over the role of being my own guardian. Famously, Gloria Seinem once advised woman that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What i've only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father too. And this is why I sent myself to bed that night alone. Because I felt it was too soon for me to be receiving a gentleman suitor." p.286

"This is the absolute value of human emotion--joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma; dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing." p.280


"All these Western men come here after they've made a mess of their lives back home, and they decide they've had it with Western women, and they go marry some tiny, sweet, obedien little Balinese teenage girl. I know what they're thinking. They think this pretty little girl will mae them happy, make their lives easy. But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. GOOD LUCK. Because you still have a woman in front of you my friend. And you are still a man. It's still two human beings trying to get along, so t's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having broken heart. It means we have tried for something." p. 277

"I said, My eart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love storyends?"
"Darling, I am southern Brazilian. I can keep a broken heart going for ten years over a woman I never even kissed." p.277

"Karma is a notion I've always liked. The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it's ovbious how often we mustrepeat our sme mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and ofte catastropic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western psychology, by the way) -- take care of the problems now, or else you'll just have to suffer agin later when you crew everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering--that's hll. Moving out of that endless repetitin to a new level o understanding-there's where you'll find heaven and hell." p.262

"I'm putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected bu guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there as insurance against future trials in life. This is a practice I've come to call "Dilligent Joy." p.260