All the Way to the River Quotes

“Here’s what you need to understand about other people’s addictions: You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it. There’s nothing you can do to manage Rayya at this point, and the more you try to control the situation, the more you will lose. When it comes to other people’s addictions, whatever you try to control ends up controlling you.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“A more fruitful question than “Why me?” could be “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?” Because what if that’s really what it’s all about?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Addiction never rests; it only waits.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I understand now that unsolicited advice is always driven by panic on the part of the person bestowing it, and I am frequently guilty of that panic myself. (I would much rather tell you what to do, in other words, than sit with my sadness or anger or fear about what you are doing.) And the more we love and need someone, typically, the more we try to control them—especially when we are afraid.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, and metastasizes.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“What we commonly call an “addict,” I believe, is just an exaggerated version of all of us—just a person so desperately in search of relief from the sting of life that they will use anything (or anyone) to soothe it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“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.)”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“PRAYER FOR A RECOVERING CODEPENDENT

What is missing from your constitution right now, my darling, is not empathy, but courage.

It takes fortitude not to leap into somebody else’s suffering with them and call that love.

It takes faith to know that you are not the appointed arbiter of anyone else’s journey.

And it takes humility to admit that you cannot control anyone—
that you might not even understand what you’re looking at.

What you call a “crisis” might be someone else’s awakening, ten thousand lifetimes in the making.

(The awakening, my love, might even be your own.)

And what you call “care” might be dangerous disruption of an ecosystem of unimaginable delicacy.

How hard that person’s soul might have fought its way through the cosmos for millions of ages
to finally arrive here—on the final precipice of egoic collapse.

How close they might be, at last, to freedom.

All they have to do now is shatter.

Maybe stand back.

Maybe let it happen.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

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

Or at least, what do they think they’re getting?

Because nobody overgives for no reason—even if those reasons are deeply hidden or disguised as acts of pure altruism.

So what is the payoff, exactly?
In my case, the payoff has always been love—or at least, the desperate hope of love.

And how far am I willing to go—how much will I extend myself, exhaust myself, burn myself out, or manipulate, seduce, soothe, manage, and control others—in order to get my own hidden needs and hungers met?

Are you kidding me?
To earn love?
I will give up everything I have.
I will overgive myself right to the edge of annihilation.

But only always.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I’ve heard it said that addiction is giving up everything for one thing, while recovery is giving up one thing for everything.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I took solace from old-timers who told me in simple terms that withdrawal is indeed excruciating—but it’s a pain that will eventually end, whereas addiction is a pain that will never end.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“For others, God is nature (as indicated by the helpful acronym GOD, for “Go Out Doors”).”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“But Rayya both demanded the truth and could deal wit’ it—and that, to my eye, was a miracle. If there was anything tense or unspoken between Rayya and another person, she’d say to them, “Let’s just lay it on the table, man. The sooner we see this mess, the sooner we can start cleaning it”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“But some of the really brave students—the ones who wanted to make the most of their experience in Earth School—asked, “Okay, who will volunteer to be my abuser this time?” or “Who will be my alcoholic family member?” or “Who will be the lover who betrays me?” or “Who will be the child who breaks my heart?” or “Who will be the one who dies and leaves me all alone?” Now here comes the miracle. To each request, some benevolent soul on the other side of the boardroom raised their hand and said, “I’ll do that for you, my love. I’ll do that.” And so our teachers arranged to meet us. They agreed to bring us gifts not only of kindness and compassion but also of pain and trauma—by being exactly the people we needed to crash into at some prearranged moment so we could be broken open enough to perhaps learn something essential from the encounter, graduate from that lesson, and evolve ever closer to the light. Wouldn’t that be incredibly generous of someone, to do that for you? To help you grow like that?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“A more fruitful question than “Why me?” could be “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“God gives the brightest students the toughest assignments,”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“We live in solutions, dude, or else we die.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“If we add to this the astronomical rates at which women are harmed and murdered by their boyfriends and husbands, and how difficult (if not impossible) it is for some women to leave their abusers, I think it’s no exaggeration to suggest that sex and love addiction might be one of the leading causes of death for women worldwide.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“... The clarity, the simplicity of what she had been told by the doctors. 'Everyone spends their lives wondering how they're going to die. And now I get to know? That's amazing. It's done. It's settled. Why do I feel like this is such great news? It just makes everything so easy.' Then she would launch into a rapturous list of all the things she never had to do or worry about...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“My view of humanity is that all of us are innocent, or none of us are. Because nobody wakes up every morning and says, “How can I be the most fucked-up possible version of myself? How can I cause the greatest amount of harm to myself and others—perhaps even creating patterns of dysfunction that will impact multitudes of people for generations to come?” The only thing anyone is ever trying to do is survive their minds, their histories, their dilemmas, their destinies, their days. And everyone struggles, and everyone flounders, and everyone deploys their very best coping strategies to relieve themselves of suffering, and we’re all doing the best we can. And most of all, as God only knows: Everyone belongs here.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Still, I kept coming back. I listened hard, and I took furious, scribbled notes. Drip by drip, one word at a time, one meeting at a time, God was dropping clues of awakening into my ears, into my brain, into the chambers of my heart, into the pages of my journal. I wasn’t quite ready for it yet, but nevertheless it was happening. Because that’s how things always seem to go here in Earth School: Just when you aren’t ready for change, the changes begin.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“Of all the human desires, the need to feel love 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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“(This instantaneous act of trust says just as much about me, by the way, as it does about her: I have always loved handing myself over to perfect strangers.)”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“My precious”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“We cannot access tomorrow’s wisdom today, much less yesterday. And when wisdom finally does arrive, it often enters our minds through the pain of a lived experience. If you haven’t lived the experience yet, then you don’t get the wisdom.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“I remember asking Rayya . . . if there was anything that somebody could have said or done back in the day, that might’ve convinced her to quit drugs sooner. She replied, “The only thing that might’ve made me clean sooner would’ve been if every person in my life he cut me off sooner. Because as long as I still had anyone left out there who I could bullshit and use, or borrow money from, or crash with, or who would listen to my sob story, there was no reason for me to quit. It wasn’t until I had burned every bridge, and there was nobody left, who would even pick up the phone when I called, that I really had to face myself and decide whether I wanted to live or die. But I had to do that alone, when there was nobody left to manipulate. If I’ve gotten to that place sooner, I might’ve quit sooner.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“And I must also remember the heartbreaking rules of Earth School. The reality is that, at any given time in a human life, we cannot see beyond what we understand to be true right then.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River