The Confession Club Quotes

“We forget how ready people are to help. You can talk all you want about the evil spirit of man. But I don’t think it’s true. I think most of us are just dying to be good. And one way we can do that is to forgive the bad in others as well as in ourselves. I don’t say don’t hold people accountable. Help them be accountable. But to say those words to yourself or another? ‘I forgive you’? Most powerful words in the world.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“That’s what life is, at its best. A confession club: people admitting to doubts and fears and failures. That’s what brings us closer to one another, our imperfections.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“You know what? That woman’s pain being greater than yours doesn’t make your pain any less. She deserves the best we can offer, and so do you. Now roll over and hike up your johnnie.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“The mystical teachings do not erase sorrow. They say, here is your life. What will you do with it?”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“I think love is all about risk. And reinvention. And honesty and revelation. And if you don’t have that in a relationship, you don’t grow, and you don’t stay true to what you started together.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“Biscuit rage, I call it,” Gretchen says. “It’s that sudden rising up of irrational and completely outsize anger you can experience when you least expect it. You know what I mean: someone takes that last biscuit that you were just going to take, and you just want to bite their ear off. It’s like road rage, only domestic.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“John strums the guitar and begins to sing, “When I die / don’t put me in the ground / Put my ashes in the ashtray / and drive me around.” He sings the word around like James Taylor does, with a long a. Iris laughs. “Did you write that?” “Nope. A genius songwriter named Warren Nelson wrote that.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“little disappointments seem like paper cuts; they can bother you more than the big things do.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“His mother said, "Oh, it's miserable to love, Johnny, I'm sorry to tell you so. Miserable for me, anyway, because I feel it too hard. And what happens then? What do you think? You go from the lovely direct to the pain - you can't help it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“She picked out a pleasing mismatch of dishes from various thrift stores. “They speak the same language,” Maddy said, about the dishes. “But they’re not all saying the same thing.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“It’s all broken glass inside me, she once wrote in her journal, when she was in high school. I breathe, and I cut myself.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“The filing of citizenry out from coffee shops always reminds Iris of cattle coming out of a barn in the morning, in their slow, blinking line. Not the most flattering of images, but for her, it’s calming, suggesting a kind of optimism about at least one thing in the world. A new day. A new start.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“Gretchen is sixty-nine years old and one of those former knockouts who just can’t stop mourning the loss of her looks. She admits that if she didn’t think God would punish her by making her die on the OR table—and if she could afford it—she’d have every bit of plastic surgery she could, head to toe. Gretchen knows she is shallow in this regard, but she kind of enjoys being shallow this way.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“wowsome. Out”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“The cookie tray goes round and round. Outside, the moon rises. The wind is still. All over town, leaves hang on trees like open hands.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“she allows herself to use it in between loads of laundry so she’ll be happy about doing the laundry.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“those phones have become adult pacifiers.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“anomaly, when in fact it’s how the girl usually eats: head down, minimal conversation, maximum speed in clearing what she’ll eat from her plate.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“false vision, an unconscious surrender to seeing things another way.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“some of us create our own prisons for ourselves, we fall into ways of being that we feel we can’t change.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“It’s good to see untended things thriving.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“Birds are everywhere, singing their hearts out every morning, including a bachelor mockingbird, who courts the ladies with his playlist of imitative calls.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“sometimes grief made people eat a lot, grief and the realization that life really did come to an end.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“women of a certain age who still want to fight the good fight, as Gretchen sees it. She has”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“Go about your business in the best way you know how, and love will find you. You know what they say: It’s like a butterfly—you do better letting it land on you than trying to capture it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“Mason’s Make-It-Happen Realtor!”),”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“don’t know why I can’t stop crying. Too much good news lately, I guess. Bad news I can handle. I expect bad news. I’ve dealt with bad news all my life. Good news makes me cry.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“I don’t know why I can’t stop crying. Too much good news lately, I guess. Bad news I can handle. I expect bad news. I’ve dealt with bad news all my life. Good news makes me cry.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club