Book Quotes

Sometimes when I read a book, I carry a set of post-it notes with me so that I can mark interesting sentences. I then retype those sentences, and even if I never go back to re-read them, I am glad knowing I have them stored in my computer.

Because I now have this blog, I thought I'd just type them up here.

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Despite all the buzz, or maybe because of it, about this book, I did not love it. In fact, I stayed in bed today in the morning and just made myself finish it. But there were still some gems in the book, and I'm quoting them below)

Om Namah Shivaya: I honor the divinity that resides within me.

...and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Ham-sa: I am That

I've been a puppet to this and to millions of other small and large signals of pain or pleasure throughout my life. Whenever something happens, I always react. But there I was-disregarding the reflex. I was doing something I'd never done before. A small thing, granted, but how often do I get to say that? And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?

Every time a diminishing thought arises, I repeat the vow. I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.

Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert.

Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline.

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 a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. 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.

To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

...and I wonder if I am capable of being somebody's sun, somebody's everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else's life?

Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.