Committed.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, recently published a follow-up book: Committed.

I wasn't sure I'd love it -- especially since the content didn't really apply to me as a content, unmarried person. To be honest, it wasn't my favorite. But as it turned out, my brain was so thirsty for her enchantingly refreshing writing style that I just drank that whole book up in spite of myself.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book are:

• When you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture, it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It's the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.

• The happier twin sister of loneliness is privacy.

• Lebensneid - life envy, the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you.

• When you have only one path set before you, you can generally feel confident that it was the correct path to have taken.

• Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

• I need him because I happen to adore him, because his company brings me gladness & comfort, and because, as a friend's grandfather once put it, "Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone."

• The emergency that always gets you in the end is the one you didn't prepare for.

• There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, almost despite themselves.

• At some point in our lives we must stop beating ourselves up over bygone blunders -- even blunders that seem so painfully obvious to us in retrospect -- and we must move on with our lives.