The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”

“We are fiddle, fork, and spoon, We are dancing with the moon, If you’d like to steal a kiss from us, You’d better steal one soon!”

It used to be that God was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.

One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed.

People could be many things, apparently, and all at once.

Death—so feared and so dodged—was, once you faced it, the simplest thing going. In order to die, one merely had to stop attempting to live.

The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”

I believe that life cannot be survived—that is evident!—but if one is lucky, life can be endured for quite a long while. If one is both lucky and stubborn, life can sometimes even be enjoyed.”