Elizabeth Berg > Quotes

“...I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending

“You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are...off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart.”
― Elizabeth Berg

“There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending

“I always think incipent miracles surround us, waiting only to see if our faith is strong enough. We won't have to understand it; it will just work, like a beating heart, like love. Really, no matter how frightened and discouraged I may become about the future, I look forward to it. In spite of everything I see all around me every day, I have a shaky assurance that everything will turn out fine. I don't think I'm the only one. Why else would the phrase "everything's all right" ease a deep and troubled place in so many of us? We just don't know, we never know so much, yet we have such faith. We hold our hands over our hurts and lean forward, full of yearning and forgiveness. It is how we keep on, this kind of hope.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“Don't let your habits become handcuffs”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“Sometimes you know before you know.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Range Of Motion

“I will come back as a little breeze. You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I am still listening. So you can still talk to me.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Joy School

“Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.”
― Elizabeth Berg, True to Form

“Well, most women are full to the brim, that's all...We are, most of us, ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with "Mommy" embroidered over the left breast, over the heart...If a stranger had come up to me and said, "Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen," I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Pull Of The Moon

“One thing I have always been is too short. It's adorable when you're in junior high. After that, it's a pain in the ass for the rest of your life.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“We ate, we slept, we formed our kaleidoscopic relationships and marched ever forward. We licked chocolate from our fingers. We arranged flowers in vases. We inspected our backsides when we tried on new clothes. We gave ourselves over to art. We elected officials and complained. We stood up for home runs. We marked life passages in ceremonies we attended with impatience and pride. We reached out for new love when what we had died, confessing our unworthiness, confessing our great need. We felt at times that perhaps we really were visitors from another planet. We occasionally wondered if it was true that each of us was making everything up. But this was a wobbly saucer; this was thinking we could not endure; we went back to our elegant denial of unbreachable isolation, to refusing the lesson of being born alone and dying that way, too. We went back to loving, to eating, to sleeping, to marching and marching and marching along.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“It is never about how good your voice is; it is only about feeling the urge to sing, and then having the courage to do it with the voice you are given.”
― Elizabeth Berg

“Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“When it's new and important, you have to rest in between times. And anyway, even when I like a person there is a weariness that comes. I can be with someone and everything is fine and then all of a sudden it can wash over me like a sickness, that I need the quiet of my own self. I need to unload my head and look at what I've got in there so far. See it. Think what it means. I always need to come back to being alone for a while.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Joy School

“There is love in holding, and there is love in letting go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“Well, anyway, her death changed our lives for the better, because it brought a kind of awareness, a specific sense of purpose and appreciation we hadn't had before. Would I trade that in order to have her back? In a fraction of a millisecond. But I won't ever have her back. So I have taken this, as her great gift to us. But. Do I block her out? Never. Do I think of her? Always. In some part of my brain, I think of her every single moment of every single day.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“books are like confort food without the calories”
― Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe

“Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren't all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don't look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Day I Ate Everything I Wanted: Stories

“She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe

“I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe

“But it seemed to me that this was the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and the salvation.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.”
― Elizabeth Berg, We Are All Welcome Here

“The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“I remove my wedding rings and put them in the jewelry box. So many others have done this. I am not the only one. I am not the only one. But here, I am the only one.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Open House

“Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Never Change

“You must never check for a person's pulse using your thumb, or you'll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I'm the one who's here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.”
― Elizabeth Berg, What We Keep

“I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I mean?”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“I think of all that is happening elsewhere, as I lie here. Nearby, I can hear the sounds of a road crew. Somewhere else, monkeys chatter in trees. A male seahorse becomes pregnant. A diamond forms, a bee dances out directions, a windshield shatters. Somewhere a mother spreads peanut butter for her son's lunch, a lover sighs, a knitter binds off the edge of a sleeve. Clouds gather to make rain, corn ripens on the stalk, a cancer cell divides, a little league team scores. Somewhere blossoms open, a man pushes a knife in deeper, a painter darkens her blue. A cashier pours new dimes into an outstretched hand, rainbows form and fade, plates in the earth shift and settle. A woman opens a velvet box, male spiders pluck gently on the females' webs, falcons fall from the sky. Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything. You can want to live and end up choosing death; and you can want to die and end up living. What keeps us here, really? A thread that breaks in a breeze. And yet a thread that cannot be broken”
― Elizabeth Berg, Never Change

“Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation

“Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“For what reason would I lie to one I so love?”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Handmaid and the Carpenter

“My mother lost too much and repaired herself in the only way she was able to repair herself. That in fact she is repairing herself, hour by hour.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Open House

“*We give so little when it's in us always to give so much more.

It's bothering to listen with an open heart to someone who smells bad. It's hard.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending

“I wasn't sure it was right to abandon myself to lighthearted banter, to allow someone to interfere with my being able to behave in whatever way I chose, whenever I wanted. What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn't weaned from that yet; I wasn't finished being with him in the only way I had left.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“I thought of the priest who'd told me that many religions hold that it is easier to be closely connected to people we love after death than before.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“Oh just wait. It takes a lot of time, that's all...You'll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you've ever had. A certain richness happens only later in life. I guess its' a kind of mellowing. p 80
talking about marriage and husbands”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Pull Of The Moon

“I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?”
― Elizabeth Berg, Joy School

“This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Joy School

“There are some things you never say good-bye to”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“For all it's problems and difficulties, life is mostly a wonderful experience, and it is up to each person to make the most of each day. I hope you are successful in your life, but look to the heavens and the earth and especially to other people to find your real wealth. Wherever I am, wherever you go, know that my love goes with you.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue