#yea

During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy. ↗

— Gustav Stresemann

#during #few #foreign #foreign policy #german

Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.'' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?' ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#always #enough #every #few #finally

I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#begins #deal #did #down #down the road

Men go into marriage with virtually no expectations whatsoever. Ten years later, the men are delightfully surprised to find out that it's actually kind of nice, and the women have sort of had to take a nose dive from what they thought it was going to be. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#delightfully #dive #expectations #find #go

My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#born #brazil #communal #corrupt #democracies

Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall,' which blew the top of my head straight off. I've read it three times, and I'm still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#few #figure #hall #head #hilary

That is who Barack Obama is - a person of admirable character - and that is who he has remained for me over these last four years. I have not agreed with his every decision, but never once have I seen him break his cool, lose his composure, or abandon his insightful perspective - even during the most serious and/or absurd national disasters. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#absurd #admirable #agreed #barack #barack obama

When I lost my friends, it was because I had used the power of giving on them recklessly. I swept into their lives with my big fat checkbook, and I erased years of obstacles for them overnight - but sometimes, in the process, I also accidentally erased years of dignity. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#also #because #big #dignity #erased

Which is - you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#after #another #anything #book #came

To me, at forty-four years old, my book was a search for truth and identity. ↗

— Melissa Gilbert

#identity #me #old #search #truth