Merton (Trisha)

"If you want to identify me, ask not where I live, or what i like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for."

Thomas Merton
My Argument with the Gestapo

Elizabeth Gilbert (Trisha)

"We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauman, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safe-keeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you're craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a poet. If you bring the right earnestness to your homemade ceremony, God will provide the grace. And that is why we need God.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love