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Book: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Quotes of Book: Committed: A Skeptic Makes
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  1. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.
    book-quotemarriage

  2. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    Love renders all of our plans and all of our hopes a gamble
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  3. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    The Buddha taught that all human suffering is rooted in desire. Don't we all know this to be true? Any of us who have ever desired something and then didn't get it {or, worse, got it and subsequently lost it} know full well the suffering of which the Buddah spoke. Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody - really want him - it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause you lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain the object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such primal urgency, you no longer completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own yearnings."
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  4. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It's the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.
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  5. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.
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  6. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.
    book-quotemarriage

  7. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more that I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I've overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance.
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  8. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.
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  9. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    And even beyond the flaws, there are just some simple differences between Felipe and me that we will both have to accept. He will never-I promise you-attend a yoga class with me, no matter how many times I may try to convince him that he would absolutely love it. {He would absolutely not love it.} We will never meditate together on a weekend spiritual retreat. I will never get him to cut back on all the red meat, or to do some sort of faddish fasting cleanse with me, just for the fun of it. I will never get him to smooth out his temperament, which burns at sometimes exhausting extremes. He will never take up hobbies with me, I am certain of this. We will not stroll through the farmer's market hand in hand or go on a hike together specifically to identify wildflowers. And although he is happy to sit and listen to me talk all day long about why I love Henry James, he will never read the collected works of Henry James by my side-so this most exquisite pleasure of mine must remain a private one.
    book-quotetruthmarriageromance

  10. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    Marriage is what happens "between the memorable." He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and wall we can recall are "the vacations, and emergencies" - the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody- so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present, that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?"
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  11. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
    book-quotemarriage

  12. Elizabeth Gilbert _ Committed: A Skeptic Makes

    Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision.
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