Inspirational Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.”

“Saint Anthony said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.”

“I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.”

“PRAYER FOR A RECOVERING CODEPENDENT”

“But for anyone out there whose life is being ruined by an active addict right now, please allow me to say the one thing that I don’t think gets said strongly enough or often enough: it’s okay for you to leave them. Don’t get me wrong: Addicts are precious and suffering children of God, and they do not deserve your contempt.”

“I remember once listening to Rayya counsel a friend whose younger brother was lost in heroin addiction. This woman kept trying to save her beloved sibling by paying for one rehab after another, by trying to get him jobs, by bailing him out of jail, by letting him borrow her car, sleep on her couch, exploit her financially, use her soft heart as a landing pad. She was wrung out by years of heartbreak.”

“It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.”

“Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)”

“When you are in the grip of addiction, or when you are severely impacted by someone else’s addiction, eventually nothing works—not even the things that don’t seem obviously related to the addictive substance or behavior. Losing the lease to our apartment and getting my bank account hacked had nothing to do with the fact that Rayya was drugged out of her mind, or that I was lost in a dense fog of codependency—but these are also the kinds of things that happen when your life is falling apart: suddenly it’s raining hammers. Everything unravels. You sprain your ankle, your car breaks down, your dog dies. You can’t handle anything. And that’s when the madness really sets in, because it seems like the world itself is a machine of pain that has turned its full force against you.”

“I know the voice of God the way a blind, mewling, newborn kitten knows the smell of its mother.”

“Child, you keep demanding impossible promises from those who cannot even take care of themselves.”

“Image management” is something addicts care a lot about, and I am no exception.”

“Someone else said: “Guess what? A lot of drug addicts and alcoholics in recovery get cancer, or other terrible diseases, and they all have to figure out how to manage their pain while also staying sober in their program. Rayya is not the first addict who ever went through this, and she won’t be the last. She’s not terminally unique, so don’t let her trick you into thinking she’s some kind of special case. Every addict thinks they’re a special goddamn case. But there’s nothing special about her. She’s just an addict with cancer—like many, many others before her. If Rayya wants to die clean and with dignity, she needs to get humble, go back to the rooms, and work with a sponsor to find a pain management plan that will allow her to stay in her sobriety—but are we even sure she wants that? And if she doesn’t want that, there’s nothing you can do to make things better except maybe get the hell out of there.”

“Still another person said: “Rayya could very well die now behind a locked door as a degraded and angry junkie. That would be a very sad end for her. But there’s only one thing that could make that death even sadder—and that would be if you were sitting on the floor right next to her, also behind that locked door, trapped in that nightmare with her. That would be really tragic, because now we’re talking about two destroyed lives, instead of just one. Don’t let it happen.”

“Rayya had delivered a perfect death blow—because she, of all people, knew just how to kill me. She knew exactly where my deepest insecurities were hidden. She knew I’d received messages since childhood that my “emotional bullshit” was too much trouble for anyone to deal with. She knew I was terrified that I would always drive away the people I loved by being too needy, too clingy. She knew I’d spent most of my life trying to show people only the “good parts” of me because I was sure that if they saw the pain and fear and need that lurked below the surface, they would find me repulsive and reject me. She had in fact witnessed the most unlovable parts of me, and had once seemed to love them.”

“Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey. All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments. It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway, and there’s no way to get away from it. Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place.”

“Addiction serves a purpose. It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind. Addiction is a pretty good survival strategy when all your other strategies for living have failed.”

“Attentive readers may remember that I had started attending twelve-step meetings when Rayya was on cocaine and my world was falling down around my ears. You may also remember that I’d hated every minute of those meeting—although I did take some notes.”

“I was not just sorrowful that first summer after Rayya died but also, at times, enraged. It was not only anger at Rayya’s absence that I was feeling; it was anger at myself for how much of myself I had given away—and anger at what she had left behind for me to clean up. She had assigned me the task of handling the details of her estate, for instance, which did not turn out to be an easy job. Rayya had been both contradictory and grandiose with her friends and loved ones about what her bank account actually contained and how she wished her money and possessions to be distributed. With a furiously clenched jaw, I did my best to clean up the confusion she had left behind and to manage everyone’s frustration—including my own. The financial gifts that she had promised to her friends I paid from my own account, because her own account was pretty much empty. I paid off her credit card bills, too—although people told me this was a stupid thing to do. (“Why pay the bills of the dead? What are they gonna do? Dock her paycheck?”)”

“You can’t give an addict a plan because we can’t follow a plan—not even our own plans. (Especially not our own plans.) Until the miracle of recovery happens, we addicts only ever have one plan: Use.”

“People often talk about crawling into the rooms of recovery on their knees, but when I turned to twelve-step for the second time, I felt more like I was walking in there with my hands up—like a career criminal turning herself in, ready at last to give up the game.”

“As I listened to the other addicts share their life experiences, I began to hear the story of my own life, told in a hundred different voices.”

“It was difficult to know where to find comfort, especially since I could no longer medicate myself with my oldest and deepest fantasy: that someday in the future a magical person would show up, fall in love with me, and fix everything.”

“My own sober dating plan is approximately three pages long, and it includes such items as “NO WEEKLONG FIRST DATES.” My plan also forbids me from texting obsessively between dates, dropping any existing plans or projects because of a new relationship, falling into fantasy with someone I have met in my travels (aka not in real life), moving virtual strangers into my home, trying to rescue unrecovered alcoholics or drug addicts; buying expensive gifts for new lovers; or sharing bank accounts with anyone, ever.”

“My ultimate goal in recovery is not to end up in a healthy relationship with the perfect partner, my ultimate goal in recovery is to end up in a healthy relationship with myself.”

“Like all sex and love addicts, I can feel someone’s attention and attraction from a hundred yards away—hell, I can feel them from the other side of a continent.”

“My mind was spinning around this inflaming and infuriating thought: Why can’t I be a normal person who does normal things like normal people?”

“I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship.”

“I find these days that all I want for Rayya anymore—if you can be said to want anything for somebody who has been dead for more than six years—is that she be free. Utterly and totally free.”

“There is a prayer that we recite in those rooms that I love very much. It simply says, “Dear God—thank you for all that has been given, for all that has been taken away, and for all that remains.”

“What if everything in Earth School is working exactly the way it’s supposed to be working, in other words—by teaching us things we can learn in no other way? What if everything (and everyone) that we label as “difficult” or “an obstacle” or even “dysfunctional” is in fact a deliberately designed construct meant to awaken us to our true natures—a divine crowbar, you might say, that is sent by the cosmos to knock down the doors of our ignorance, demolish our illusions, and give us the opportunity to move past our fears, find our innate courage, propagate wisdom, and help us to remember that we are of God? Of course we cannot know if this is how fate works, because none of us know how fate works. But in my life, I have certainly found that the Earth School model is a useful thought exercise during times of darkness, pain, and betrayal—for it takes me out of a victim mentality and offers up a worldview that feels far more empowering and fascinating than the limiting, anguished cry of “Why me?” A more fruitful question than “Why me?” could be “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?”

“What is the overgiver getting out of this obviously imbalanced arrangement?”

“As a sex and love addict in recovery, I define a “clean day” as any day where I have not used another human being—not as a stimulant, or a sedative; not as a badge of honor or a bodyguard; not as an emotional support animal, a sleeping pill, a sex toy, a babysitter, a parental-replacement figure, or a good-looking trophy; not as some infinitely wise Delphic oracle who is here to answer all my most challenging life questions; and certainly not as a mirror that I can stare into, searching for evidence that I am lovable, attractive, worthy, normal, respectable, special, desirable, valuable, irreplaceable, adored, secure, or good.”

“On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go-getter. But my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fear-scape. I was neither mature nor emotionally secure, and I wasn’t yet ready for the demands of adulthood. Hidden beneath all my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child constantly asking, “Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe? Where do I belong?” And thus I began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home.”

“I once estimated that between the ages of twenty and forty-eight, I lived in approximately twenty different homes. That’s not everywhere I stayed (that number would be incalculable); it’s merely everywhere I lived—everywhere that had my actual name on the lease or the mortgage. And I never lived alone. I couldn’t bear to live alone. I couldn’t bear being alone with the open wound that was my own mind. But I also couldn’t bear the chafe and strain of intimacy. I couldn’t last anywhere, and I couldn’t last with anyone. So I came and went, colliding and separating, roaming the planet, constantly looking for places to land and people to merge with. I sometimes used to call this behavior “being a free spirit,” but my wild instability was quite the opposite of freedom, because I had no agency in the matter—only urgency. Also, if I was so “free,” why did I always end up feeling trapped? It’s because my moves were motivated by desperate situations in which I was running either toward somebody or away from somebody else. I constantly found myself in stories that started out with passion but ended up with shame. So much shame, in fact, that during those years there were entire geographic regions that I had to flee at top speed, because my behavior had created dramas that made it impossible to remain there for another day. Goodbye, Philadelphia! Adios, Oaxaca! Well, I guess I can never go back to Wyoming again!”

“The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes how addicts always end up “puzzled and humiliated,” no matter how hard they try to get their lives straight. That’s how I have always felt at the end of my relationships: puzzled and humiliated. And because I have a lifelong tendency to fall in love with people who are either alcoholics or addicts themselves or the adult children of alcoholic or dysfunctional families, my partners were always in a state of disarray, as well. They brought their own disorder to my already disordered life, which added exponentially to my upheavals. One of my most chaotic relationships, for instance, was with a man who, at the time we met, was being fired from his job, breaking up with his girlfriend, and getting evicted from his apartment—all at the same time. “Move in with me!” I said, naturally enough. And so I welcomed him—this heartbroken, unemployed stranger (who, like me, was clearly struggling to find his way in the world)—into an apartment I’d rented for myself only a week earlier.”

“It’s worth questioning, in every partnership: Who is playing the traditional role of the woman here?—meaning, Who is pouring more care and nourishment into this relationship (or project, or institution)? And who is the beneficiary of all that care and nourishment? And what is the cost to the overgiver?”

“Rayya loved the truth. Truth was her religion, her passion. When I asked her why she loved the truth so much, she explained that after so many years of having to hustle and lie as an active drug addict, the truth felt like heaven to her. Truth was her place of safety, a badge of honor, and proof of her recovery. What’s more, she believed that being honest was just the simplest path through life and the surest means of eliminating confusion and drama.”

“One of the central characteristics of sex and love addicts is that we assign magical qualities to people, and then we become enraged when those people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections.”

“Once Rayya got clean and sober, she never judged people, no matter how badly they were acting out. She never condemned them—not even when she was angry or frustrated with them, not even when she was setting boundaries with them—because she knew what it was like to be at the very bottom. She knew what it was like to be feared and despised. She knew what it was like to live completely outside of your own integrity, a million miles away from your heart. As she said to me once, “Until you’ve stolen money from your father’s wallet to buy heroin while he was sick in a hospital bed, you don’t know what it feels like to need to be forgiven.” She also used to say, “Mercy is what I owe, because mercy is what I always needed—and mercy is what I have been given.”

“That night at dinner, I thanked Rayya for taking care of everybody at the funeral, and for protecting us from the dangerous young man. She looked surprised, then her face softened. “Oh, honey,” she said, and suddenly tears stood in her eyes. “Did you think I was protecting us? No, baby, no. I was protecting him. Because here’s the reality, babe: We’re fine, and we’ll always be fine—even if he stole our car! Nobody needs to worry about us. But the odds are that kid doesn’t have much longer to live. He’s really far gone, and he doesn’t have any support system. But there’s always a chance he might get clean some day, with a miracle. And if he ever cleans up his life, as part of his recovery he’ll have to make amends to every single person he’s ever harmed. And I don’t want that poor kid, in addition to everything else he’ll have to face someday, to be forced to deal with the fact that he stole money from people at his grandmother’s funeral. I wouldn’t want that for anybody. So that’s what we were doing today, honey. We were keeping him safe from that—from the worst thing he could do to himself.”

“A friend of mine who is familiar with both my messy relationship history and my recent recovery journey asked me the other day, “So where is the line, exactly, between regular love and love addiction?” To which I could only reply, “I’ve got bad news for you, buddy. Nobody really knows.” It’s the same with all addictions. When does a regular drinker become a heavy drinker? And when does a heavy drinker become a problem drinker? And when does a problem drinker become an alcoholic? And when does an alcoholic become a danger to themself and others? It’s often impossible to know exactly when, how, and why these escalations occur. In the rooms of recovery, this is called “the invisible line”—that shady moment when complete dependency sets in, and the addict is no longer capable of living a manageable or dignified life. The invisibility of that line is a large part of the reason that identifying and treating addiction is so difficult. It’s also why addicts of all varieties are so masterful at denying that they have a problem in the first place, and why they are so good at gaslighting and deceiving their loved ones. But if I had to define the difference between regular love and love addiction, I would say that it has to do with the level of intensity—with the sense of urgency, dependency, and desperation that grows by the day until it becomes an obsession, trailing behind it a wreckage of lies, destruction, and self-abandonment. And once that hungry ghost is awakened, it can never really be sated.”

“Speaking of distortions of reality, I would guess that it was probably sometime around 2011 that I started noticing that the love of my life always carried bottles of Angostura bitters around with her, hidden in her purse.”

“There were some people in Rayya’s life who had more piercing questions about the omnipresent bottles of bitters than did I. They’d say, “Wait, aren’t you sober? Are you really supposed to be drinking that stuff?”

“That night over sushi, Rayya launched into the most incredible of tales. She told me that the last time she was home in Detroit, some of her friends and family members had staged a reverse intervention, gathering together to tell her that they really, really wanted her to start drinking wine.”

“Now, listen.”

“My codependency gives me outlandish ideas about how responsible I am for others, and my anxiety distorts my perception of reality—convincing me that I can control people and keep them safe, if only I try hard enough. But I cannot control anyone.”

“That goes for all addicts. We are all runaway trains—and nobody can stop us from acting upon our worst and wildest ideas, once we get started. Nothing can stop us but a miracle.”

“If Satan existed, he could scarcely do better at seeding pain and destruction than to hide himself within the human mind, saying things like “You’re a failure and a fuckup, nobody understands you, you deserve some escape, you should probably just go drink something, or overeat, or spend a bunch of money, or fuck somebody, or take command over someone else’s existence, or blow up your own life, or just kill yourself—but don’t tell anybody I said any of this.” (Satan: translated from the Hebrew as “the accuser”—a shadowy internal figure I know all too intimately.)”

“Rayya already had a community filled with fellow recovering addicts who had loved her for years, and who would have gladly received her admissions of shame and fear and helped her to process her overwhelming desire to drink. They could have guided her back to the principles of the program—back to the acts of service that keep us sober; back to a position of humility and surrender. But Rayya had pushed all those people away in order to chart her own path. And the last thing you ever want an addict doing is charting their own path.”

“Reading Rayya’s journals today, and comparing her secret pain with the mighty persona she presented in public, I can see that she did not wish to admit powerlessness to anyone—not even to the God of her own understanding, whoever and whatever that may have been. She didn’t want anyone knowing her “business,” she wasn’t making time for any spiritual practices, and she definitely didn’t want anyone telling her she shouldn’t be drinking. There was no “life on life’s terms” happening here. The terms were all Rayya’s. And since Rayya was the biggest, toughest, smartest, coolest, most badass bitch around here, her terms were always some extremely convincing version of “I got this.” But she didn’t got it, was the problem. And instead of asking for direction from a higher power, she just kept asking herself.”

“People don’t stick needles in their arms and pump themselves full of mind-erasing drugs for no reason, after all. And the thing Rayya had always loved about heroin was the way it eliminated her from consciousness—how it allowed her to discard her entire identity, as if her “self” were some heavy old overcoat she didn’t need to wear anymore and could just throw to the floor in a crumpled heap. The only problem with heroin was that you had to come back from the high. You had to wake up, stand up, put the overcoat back on. That had always been heartbreaking for her.”

“How high can you fly before you crash?”

“I do not want to tell this part of the story because part of me still doesn’t want it to be true. I still don’t want Rayya to become who she became toward the end of her life. I want her to remain how I saw her for all those years before—heroic, brave, commanding, honest, astonishing, cool. And I still don’t want me to become what I became at the end of her life—desperate, clinging, resentful, lost, powerless, degraded, insane.”

“How quickly the dragon of addiction began to roar through Rayya’s blood—demanding what it always demands: more, more, more.”

“I can’t even tell you when my love addiction got triggered with Rayya, or when I collapsed into the utter abandonment of self that is codependency in its most deadly and life-destroying form. I can’t name the exact moment when I made her into my higher power, or when I surrendered all my will and agency to her, or when I decided that it was my job in life to serve her every desire—no matter how much it cost me, physically, emotionally, or financially.”

“Did I completely lose my mind that night in the spring of 2017 when she commanded me to give her some cash so she could buy that first gram of cocaine—and I did it, without hesitation? (In my weak defense, she had looked me straight in the eyes and told me, “This is the exact amount of cocaine that will last me until I die, trust me. I’m just gonna need a tiny amount of coke each day, to keep me from falling asleep in my soup because of the opioids. Trust me, I know how to do this. It’s better if we only risk buying it once—that’s why we’re getting such a large amount.”)”

“Secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, and metastasizes. The unfortunate reality of addiction, though, is that all active addicts keep secrets and tell lies. They really have no choice. An addict must lie in order to protect her supply. You cannot be an active addict without lying, because your interior world would collapse. If you didn’t have access to the substance, person, or behavior that regulates your nervous system, and your exterior world would collapse if people knew what you were up to—because what you are up to is not socially acceptable. Hell, what you are up to might not even be acceptable to you, which is how addicts learn to lie to themselves before they lie to anyone else. Thus the addict’s reality becomes split between what she’s doing in the shadows (sometimes even behind her own back) and what she is allowing other people to see.”

“This book is not only for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by their own addictions or by the addictions of others—although I do believe those two categories will include pretty much all of us, at some time or another. This book is also about the many ways that people—despite their best efforts at living sane and stable lives—can sometimes get swept into high-octane dramas and traumas, finding themselves washed up on shores that can feel very distant from their true natures.”

“How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life. Perhaps even at multiple points. For who among us has never gotten lost, much to our own embarrassment? Who has not ended up in scenarios that are frightening, alienating, shameful, and spirit-crushing? Who has not kept secrets, or been betrayed, or tried to control the behavior of others? Who has not longed for escape from suffering? And who has not reached for substances, people, behaviors, or distractions that offer temporary respite from the built-in discomforts of existence itself?”

“It is my way—it has always been my way—to become captivated by other people’s charisma and madness and wildness and beauty. To disappear into their stories and become hypnotized by their existence. To become lost in a trance of themness and to forget who I am, what I am, and where I stand.”

“There are not a lot of women out there who will publicly admit to being sex and love addicts, because it sounds pretty gnarly. In fact, it is gnarly. I won’t get into salacious details here, but I will say that my addiction manifests as a sincere yet deeply misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside—thereby making me feel safe, cherished, and whole at last. In real-life terms, this translates as a desperate need to have my existence constantly authenticated and re-authenticated through a romantic partner’s touch, eye contact, verbal reassurance, acts of love, or mere physical presence. How much reassurance is enough for me to finally feel secure? There has never been enough, frankly. There can never be enough.”

“My desperation to be loved is certainly outsize, and it has caused me to act out in ways that are undeniably insane. Yet I suspect that parts of my story may feel familiar to many of my readers—especially my female readers, who, like me, may have been socialized since birth to believe that they did not possess much inherent value but were estimable only insofar as they were capable of making themselves attractive enough to be chosen. Failing to succeed in this massively important project of proving yourself worthy of being chosen meant that you were a failure, and that nothing else you ever manifested would have much significance in anyone’s eyes. Or at least that’s what endless generations of women across a multitude of cultures have been taught—and that’s what I was taught, too. Sex has always been the fastest and most direct way for me to feel thoroughly chosen, but what I’m really looking for in my romantic encounters is the love, attention, validation, and approval (“LAVA” in the parlance of recovery) that other humans can sometimes provide, and without which I have often felt like I would quite literally die. Thus I have spent my entire life searching for that magical person who will see me and save me—whether in the short term or the long term. When my plan for salvation with one person didn’t work out (and it never worked out), I just went looking for LAVA with someone else.”

“I have caused tremendous harm to myself and others through my decades of sex and love addiction. I have inserted myself into other people’s relationships, and I have broken up families. I have lied to myself and others. I have hurt people whom I promised to cherish. I have crossed boundaries with friends; I have run away from people who cared about me and toward people who didn’t. I have cheated on people and allowed myself to be cheated upon. I have tried to buy love with money; I have triangulated, strategized, and manipulated. I have seduced people and discarded them, just as often as I have been seduced and discarded. I have committed and accepted shameful objectification. I have used other people’s bodies as drugs (both sedatives and stimulants). I have treated my own body with terrible disrespect—and I have never been able to stop. The closest I’ve ever come to suicide is because of my sex and love addiction, and also the closest I’ve ever come to murder.”

“My problem is what’s officially called a “process addiction,” as opposed to “substance addiction,” which was Rayya’s downfall. Process addictions are characterized by extreme compulsivity around certain behaviors—gambling, shopping, hoarding, eating, sex, control, obsession, gaming, skin picking, etc. Put simply: Rayya was addicted to drugs; I am addicted to people. Although I do believe that Rayya was a love addict, as well. In fact, many folks in the rooms of recovery surmise that love addiction is at the bottom of all the other addictions. Our famished yearning for love is the great yawning chasm that we keep trying to fill with other things—with drugs, alcohol, food, money, sex, cigarettes, gambling, gaming, success, perfectionism, workaholism, internet addiction, you name it. Of all the human desires, the need to feel loved is the most fundamental. When unmet or perverted at a tender age, that need can warp our brains into making dangerous and even insane decisions for the rest of our lives.”

“From what I now understand, given the latest neurological research, people like me—people with process addictions—have nervous systems that don’t work quite right. Many of us, having experienced at a young age what are officially referred to as “consistent disruptions of safety,” have trouble regulating our own emotions, taking care of ourselves, telling fantasy from reality, understanding the concept of boundaries, knowing whom to trust, and distinguishing our feelings from other people’s feelings. As a result, we can end up with an attachment style that is sometimes referred to as “disordered-disoriented”—which describes my romantic history perfectly.”

“Over the years, I’ve used plenty of alcohol and drugs (both legal and illegal) in order to get numb or high—but not nearly at the level that I have used people. I don’t actually need alcohol and drugs to alter my consciousness, because the pharmacy built right into my brain churns out enormous amounts of dopamine as a reward for the experience of sexuality, physical closeness, and emotional arousal—and at a rate that is esti mated to be ten times higher than that of a so-called normal person. And it’s not only dopamine that my brain overproduces when I’m infatuated with someone; it’s also adrenaline, oxytocin, serotonin, and norepinephrine. When combined in a powerful rush, these hormones fill me with an almost godlike sense of euphoria, removing my ability to feel pain or calculate risk, warping my perception of reality, and taking away my desire for sleep, food, and fulfillment of other basic life-supporting needs. Other people might experience pleasurable sensations from romance, fantasy, or sex; I get wasted.”

“Like all addicts, then, I have suffered—and I have been the cause of suffering in others. Like all addicts, I have kept secrets. Like all addicts, I have lived a double life. Like all addicts, I have always kept a hidden stash of supply to keep me from jonesing. (In my case, “supply” would be potential love interests, with whom I was constantly flirting, texting, temperature checking, and testing the waters—in case I needed them someday.) And there is nothing cute or harmless about flirtation when I engage in it. I’ve heard it said before that drug addicts steal people’s money, but love addicts steal people’s time, energy, and emotional attention—which is even worse, because those thefts hurt people at the level of their heart, at the deepest core of their being. Those thefts leave wounds that may never heal—deep wounds to all involved.”

“Like many addicts, I always suspected there was something wrong with me. I was a full-on romantic obsessive by the time I was in grammar school (I can still tell you the birthday of every boy I had a crush on in second grade). I knew I was out of control by the time I reached high school, when I kept bouncing from boyfriend to boyfriend, from drama to drama, never able to find peace with anyone. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew that my friends didn’t act the way I acted. My early twenties were an even bigger mess, as I shipwrecked my heart and body upon one rocky shore after another. But I always thought I could get myself under control by using willpower and common sense—or by finding a new partner. And many times over the years I did pull myself together. I got over it and found someone new or even better. Many times, I believed I had this problem solved—only to discover that I super did not have this problem solved.”

“The line between a problematic behavior and an addiction is a murky one—perhaps even invisible. But a good test as to whether you’re an addict or not is to answer these three questions as honestly as possible: 1. Have you tried to stop this behavior and you can’t? 2. Have you managed to stop at times—but you can’t stay stopped? 3. Has your behavior brought consequences to your life that might cause a normal person to say, “Wow, I’ll certainly never do that thing again!”—yet you keep doing that thing?”

“I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t stay stopped; I kept doing that thing.”

“I did things for and within that relationship that no sane or emotionally stable person would ever do. And I woke up at the end of that encounter exactly the way another kind of addict might wake up in a motel room somewhere off the highway outside Vegas, wrecked and bewildered, with no memory of how she had gotten there—and not sure where that fresh new tattoo had come from, either. Blinking in the blazing sun, wondering where her money went, and asking in devastated confusion, “How did that just happen?” Or maybe it would be more accurate to ask: “How did that just happen again?”

“Partially, the reason I don’t blame anybody for my problems is because I don’t think it’s particularly useful to hold others responsible for my fate or for my behaviors. But I also believe that the people who harmed me had no more control over their compulsive actions than I’ve ever had over mine. And that is nobody’s fault. We are all descended from the same confounding human bloodline, after all—every one of us born of the same long and tangled lineage of addicts and their enablers; narcissists and their prey; the mentally ill and their beleaguered civilian orderlies; abusers and their apologists; manipulators and martyrs; secrets and secret keepers; suicides and sorrows. Beautiful people, so many of them. Beautiful, talented, extraordinary people who all struggled. Beautiful, talented, extraordinary, and terrified people who were all seeking something outside of themselves that could relieve them from their interior pain. I’m just one of the lucky ones who finally found her way to the rooms of recovery.”

“The whole time I was getting involved with Rayya—becoming her friend, falling in love with her, walking all the way to the river with her, being driven to the edge of madness by her awful relapse into active drug addiction—I didn’t know that I was suffering from a dangerous addiction, too, which was leading both of our hearts into treacherous territory. I mean, I knew I was plenty messed up, in terms of my romantic relationships, but I didn’t know I was an addict. And I certainly did not know that, over time, I would become just as addicted to Rayya as she was to drugs. My addiction doesn’t mean I didn’t love Rayya; I always loved her, and I always will. My addiction merely means that I needed Rayya at a level that was far beyond healthy. I came to believe, quite literally, that I could not live without Rayya—that a world without Rayya’s attention and infinitely calming ministrations was a world not worth enduring. Driven mad by fear and longing, I tried to drain all the love from Rayya into me before she died—as though through some crazy emotional blood transfusion. In so doing, I turned into a vampire, which is what all active addicts eventually become. And the whole time we were together, Rayya didn’t know she was an addict, either. Meaning: She had forgotten. Like all addicts, Rayya had a disease that lied to her—a disease that told her she didn’t have a disease. Forgetting that she was powerless over her drug addiction, she slid into a relapse. And then she became a vampire, as well.”

“How you can tell you might be in a codependent relationship: You care more about somebody else’s well-being than they do, and/or you believe that you cannot function without them, and/or you believe that they cannot function without you. The codependent’s motto: 'You break it, we fix it!”

“What codependency feels like at first: “You complete me!” or “I will be your hero!” What codependency feels like later on: watching in horror as someone else’s life passes before your eyes; wondering in utter bewilderment where your own life went. The final destination of codependency: rage, emptiness, loneliness, despair. The anthem of the exhausted codependent: “After all I’ve done for you!”

“To even talk about not having a partner makes the story about me not having a partner. What is actually happening in the ecosystem of my spiritual life and my physical life and my emotional life is that a garden is blooming. . . . It isn’t about who isn’t here. It is about what is here.”

“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”

“I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-- despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - pg 20-21”

“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.”

“With each reunion (we) had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me?”

“What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together -- in misery, but happy to not be apart.”

“I think presence is the greatest gift that you can give to yourself, to the world.”

“To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.”

“Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile.”

“Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.”

“The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go.”

“So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.”

“You have been to hell, Ketut?”

“At that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), that's when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message:”

“My friend Bob, who is both a student of Yoga and a neuroscientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of the chakras, that he wanted to actually see them in a dissected human body in order to believe they existed. But after a particularly transcendent meditative experience, he came away with a new understanding of it. He said,'Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true”

“The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you have given up.. if we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be.. a prudent insurance policy.”

“Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.”

“Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, 'Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I am voicing in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.' There is a reason that we refer to leaps-of-faith, because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove that their faith is rational; it isn't. If they were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face first and full speed into the dark.”

“There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.”

“A family in my sister's neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this IS grace.”

“Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.”

“He showed me a sketch he'd drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart.”

“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope”

“Your tears are my prayers.”