The Year of Pleasures Quotes

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

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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“No one could ever be for me what [he] had been because he had known me when, and that had kept me away from the true reality of my years.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“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

“Willow trees dipped their bare branches into pond water like girls testing the temperature with their toes.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“There I was, waiting, afraid I’d never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures