Book

Committed: A Love Story

The #1 New York Times bestselling follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love--an intimate and erudite celebration of love—from the author of Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Eliza

(17 total)

Characters

Elizabeth Gilbert (17)

“Every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world – that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets…”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Marriage

“The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Marriage

“It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment

“The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment

“In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, forgiveness

“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 a lacerating injury.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Desire

“This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Commitment, Intimacy

“Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Desire

“By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, The Heart

“People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestl…”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Acceptance, Flaws

“Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Marriage

“For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Men

“Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Expectations

“Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, Infatuation

“Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.’”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Commitment, real love, Respect

“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Marriage, Commitment

“Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable 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…”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, amazon.com