Never Change Quotes

“But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Never Change

“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

“The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open hand.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Never Change

“I got tears in my eyes, but they were not the crying kind, they were just the kind that show you your body agrees so much with what your mind just said.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Jesenski blues

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

“The summer I was ten years old, there was a group of kids in my neighborhood who played together every night after dinner. I often watched them from my window…Every night around nine-thirty or ten, those kids would get called in one by one…I knew the first ones called were full of resentment. But they needn’t have been. Nothing ever happened after they left anyway. Things just sort of ended in a slow motion way, like petals falling off a flower. You couldn’t have people leave like that and have anything good happen afterward. Whoever was left couldn’t pay much attention to anything other than waiting for their turn to get called in. So, it wasn’t so bad to go first, to head back toward those deep yellow lights and beds made up with summer linens. It was much better than being last, when you would be left standing there alone, finally going in without anybody calling you.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Never Change

“Only way I can get any shut-eye is to sleep on the floor.” “I see.” “It ain’t permanent,” he said. “I’m working on it. I guess it’s about time! In the meantime, you know what I just put up? Curtain rods! I didn’t know there even was such a thing!” He showed me the rods he’d put up, and the curtains he’d hung from them. They were obviously used, but they were lovely, a burgundy-and-cream pattern made more beautiful by their fading, I thought, and I told him so. Three weeks later, he was sleeping all night in his bed. “It never was the bed’s fault,” he said. “Bed’s just great. But I’ll tell you something. Every night, I sit on the edge and think, ‘Now, do I want to sleep on the bed or on the floor?’ I guess that’s just the way it’s going to be with me.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Never Change

“I throw sticks for him, and it comes to me that it is a miracle I am able to do this: use my arm, full strength. Follow the course of the stick clearly. Walk without fatigue or pain. Assume, with blind confidence, that I will be able to do this tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Spend an afternoon with someone who has been told their number is up, and you will will regard everything you do later that day with grateful wonder. I mean, even laundry.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Never Change