Elizabeth Berg Quotes

Books are like confort food without the calories

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.

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.

I hate banana bread. It's too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.

The heart of myself has always been something just wanting so bad. I have had an empty center, black as a basement, but also knowing about light and waiting. Young as I am, I know now that everything is about to come. Jimmy will be the place for me to learn the real happiness. He will be my Joy School. My joy. Mine.

I once read that Martha Stewart never wears a bathrobe. Not that I like Martha Stewart, nobody likes Martha Stewart, I don't think even Martha Stewart likes Martha Stewart.

What does anyone say to anybody who used to be so important in her life, whom she's not seen in such a long time? It seems to me that in situations like this, we're all wondering the same thing: I'm still me; are you still you? A

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.

By now I was feeling the shame but also defiance. Like here, I'm carrying the banner for all of you who cut off a little piece of cake wanting a big one, who spend a good third of your waking hours feeling bad about your desires, who infect those with whom you work and live with your judgements and pronouncements, you on the program who tally points all day long, every day, let's see, 7 for breakfast, I'm going to need only 3 or 4 for lunch, what the hell can I have for so little, oh, I know, broth and a salad with very little dressing. And broth is good! Yes! So chickeny! That's what we tell ourselves, we who cannot eat air without gaining, we who eat the asparagus longing for the potatoes au gratin, for the fettucine Alfredo, for the pecan pie. And if you're one of those who doesn't, stop right here, you are not invited to the rest of this story.

The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon, the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.

Make time for prayer and reflection; try to understand your value as a man on earth but see, too, your proper place in the scheme of things. It may sound funny to say this, but I have come to see that we are all far more important and less important than we think.

This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.

I wasn't sure Lorraine and others like her-ones who were so despairing of marriage, ones who were so sure their expectations could never be met-understood that it was these small moments of caretaking that meant the most, that forged the real relationship. The way one pulled the blanket over the sleeping other, the way one prepared a snack for oneself, but made enough to share. Such moments made for the team of two, which made for one's sword and shield.

I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.

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.

Who doesn't long for one more time of seeing someone they've loved and lost? And yet what would you say, what would you do, if it were possible?

Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you

Now there's some honest writing!

We live but a short time, at the longest. How do we make our lives mean something? If we die in glory, with our minds and our hearts fixed on achieving a great goal, we have lived a life that mattered.

Nona leans forward, "I had-a love."
I nod.
"You know how it was? It was like-a trees. Oak and elm." Her voice has been soft, like it was lost in memory, but now she stares at me, her eyes narrowed, and she makes a fist and pounds the side of her chair. "The roots, they bound-a together, but the trees, they are free. You know what it's-a mean?

And she finally told Nola that she was so worried about whether she could love two children, about whether she could make room in her heart for as much love as she felt for Bobby. Wasn't it betraying Bobby, to love another child? And Nola told her what her sister Patricia had said, after having her second. Patricia said she felt like she'd grown a second heart.

There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.

Oh, why isn't there a Community Center for People Who Need a Little Something? If people would only tell the truth about the way they felt, it would be busy all the time. There could be folding chairs arranged in groups, people sitting there saying, "I don't know, I just wanted to come here for a while." I

There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.

My inside self and my outside self used to match. A compass needle pointed true north. Now the needle spins around and around indicating the sad direction of nowhere.

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.

The truth is, aging can be your realest opportunity to decide how best to live - and the best incentive for getting you to do just that.

He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the good place, and a heart-shaped leaf lay trapped in the hollow if his throat as though it were planned, though of course it was so perfect it couldn't have been planned.

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.

Sometimes it seems like a little moment brings a whole world with it.

As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.

I could still taste and smell and hear and see," she said. "I could still learn and I could still teach. I could still love and be loved. I had my mind and my spirit. And I had you.

You feel the call. That's the important thing. Now answer it as fully as you can. Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.

It is early morning; outside, the sky is dark and the trees move dramatically in the wind. Soon a storm will come. I want to live to see it. This is the way of nature: to persuade us around one more bend, to beckon us to behold one more vista.

My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.

She prefers cats to dogs, which is almost worse than being a conservative.

If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

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.

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.

I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.

I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to 'hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.' I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.

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.

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.

Once you start making decisions in which your heart, mind, and soul are congruent, you'll feel it as a kind of lift, if not liftoff.

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.

Hiraeth: a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places.

...(we) laughed. It was so good to laugh. I felt as though I too were reentering my legitimate self.

Or he could go back to the ease of solitude. It's really not so bad, being alone, never worrying about what has to be done for, or with, or in the interest of another. it's like you let your mind stay in its pajamas all day.

*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.

I don't know. It depends on the day. Depends on the hour of the day ... I don't really know if I really want to do that. I think I do and then I think I don't. It makes me really nervous to think about really doing it.

history is shaped by the belief systems of those who made it.

Come over here and light me a cigarette," she'd said. I'd snuck a little inhale, and my mother had smiled. But then she'd said, "Don't get started with something you won't be able to do without.

I take in a huge breath and look at the sky as hard as I can. I feel like I'm trying to eat it with my eyes. I wish there would be certain things you come across and you could say, Okay, that's one. Put that away for me to pull out later just exactly as it is now. My dream is for me to be a poet who could make things like this sky come to life for someone else. If you see a sunset and try and describe it to someone in normal words, all you can say is, "Boy, I saw a great sunset last night." but if you are a poet, you give it to someone to feel for themselves. Like you make a little seed of what you say, they swallow it, and it blooms again inside their own heart.

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.

There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.

When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.

Books educate and inspire, and they soothe souls
like comfort food without the calories.

The fancy things I like are sheets. Pots and pans. And the things I really like aren't fancy at all: old aprons and hankies. Butter wrappers from one pound blocks. Peony bushes, hardback books of poetry. And I like things less than that; the sticky remains at the bottom of the apple crisp dish. The way cats sometimes run sideways. The presence of a rainbow in a puddle of oil. Mayonaise jars. Pussy willows. Wash on a line. The tick-tock of clocks, the blue of the neon sign at the local movie house. The fact that there is a local movie house.

Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed
with a vague sadness. A longing for a speci??c kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of
shame. She knows it's nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she
never had.

Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.

If you say something over and over again, it begins to lose it's meaning ... Say anything enough times and it becomes gibberish.

There I was, waiting, afraid I'd never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.

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.

...what John likes best are the small and undramatic moments that make for a kind of easy comfort, for a feeling of being grounded in a
relationship.

How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything.

Sometimes I try to remember things my mother told me about the awful way he was raised. But why does he have to keep on going? Why would you take something bad out of your mouth and hand it to another, saying, Here, eat this?

The greatest understanding of a thing is when you can't reduce it any further

Sometimes, just when you think you're going to die from pain, rage steps in to save you. There's only so much room in a human heart.

And in my head, a person who was out walking and walking in the dark comes to a little house with a light on. Waits at the door for a moment, and then goes in. Finds such a welcome that she stays.

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.

As for mending, I think its good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. Its an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You'll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there's an art to mending. If you're careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the think because it is a testimony to its worth.

That summer rain I mean that is so quiet and matter of fact and falls straight down like a curtain. Now

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.

People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I mean?

Always pick the thing that is not a chain, is one way to try to save the world.

I will be so glad for you to hear not the sounds of gunfire but the sounds of church bells, and of people working in peace.

But now, sitting on this airplane on my way back to the life I went on to fashion after she left, I think of her differently. I see her so many ways: sitting back on her heels at the side of the bathtub, singing softly as she washes Sharla and my backs; watching at the window for the six o'clock arrival of our father; wrapping Christmas presents on the wide expanse of her bed; biting her lip as she stood before the open cupboards, making out the grocery list; leaning out the kitchen window that last summer to call Sharla and me in for supper. Most clearly, though, I see her sitting at the kitchen table, in her old, usual spot. There is a cup of coffee before her, but she doesn't drink it. Instead, she stares out the window. I see the sharp angle of her cheekbone, the beautiful whitish down at the side of face, illuminated by the sun. Her hands are quiet, resting in the cloth bowl of her apron. She sits still as a statue - waiting, I can see now; she was always waiting. -What We Keep

I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.

If you get a cat because you just loooove cats, you're going to have plenty of days when you hate it because it's acting like a cat.

You know before you know, of course. You are bending over the dryer, pulling out the still-warm sheets, and the knowledge walks up your backbone. You stare at the man you love and you are staring at nothing; he is gone before he is gone.

Some car had hit it after all, because it hadn't had the courage to honor its own correct instinct. And I began to cry because I had this thought about people, that they do this all the time, deny the wise voice inside them telling them the right thing to do because it is different. I remembered once seeing a tea party some little girls had set up outside, mismatched china, decorations of a plucked pansy blossom and a seashell and a shiny penny and a small circle of red berries and a fern, pressed wetly into the wooden table, the damp outline around it a beautiful bonus. They didn't consult the Martha Stewart guide for entertainment and gulp a martini before their guests arrived. They pulled ideas from their hearts and minds about the things that gave them pleasure, and they laid out an offering with loving intent. It was a small Garden of Eden, the occupants making something out of what they saw was theirs. Out of what they truly saw.

I also think you should take care of yourself. You can crack up a little when these things go on for so long. You've got to bring a healthy self in here. That will help him most. He needs to feel your strength. And you need to do what you have to keep it.

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.

She is her odd self. The kiln has been fired. She is a person persnickity about keeping her house clean, but not above spitting on her desk to rub out a coffee stain. She will never be an athlete, or a mathematician, or a skinny person, or someone whose heart isn't snagged by the sight of fireflies on a summer night and the lilting cadence of a few good lines of poetry.

I like to listen to sad music when I'm sad. It seems honest. It makes me cry, and sometimes a
good cry is the only thing that can make you feel better.

Have a problem with ageism, overt and especially covert. My feeling about a person's age is that it's a serving suggestion. It's up to you what you do with it: take it as offered, modify it, or ignore it altogether.

She put her hand over her heart. Oh boy. It hurts. It's a real pain. Right here.

We are assumed to be rather hopeless
swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.

There are certain things in your life that will become every important to you. You might not be able to explain to anyone else why they're important. But you will expect the people who love you, the people who are your family, to respect those things.

You know ... it's like you live your life opening doors. One after the other. You open a door onto a hallway, which leads to another door, which leads to another hallway. But then one day you open a door and it's to a closet. It doesn't go anywhere.

And in the summer we would line up three sand dollars John and I had found on our second date when we walked along the ocean holding hands, both of us taut with the knowledge the we had found The One- though neither of us admitted it until much later. It was the same beach where I scattered his ashes. It is good we don't know our own futures.

Wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their story-telling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren't good people - at least not for me.

It will happen when you're not looking for it. Love likes to take you by surprise.

We're so far away from those stars

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

This is life, uh? We lose something here; we get something there. The trick is to stop looking in the old place to find the new thing.

I think people see death as the hunter, but it's just the ticket taker, the timekeeper. It's the sound of a record playing in the background.

Are these real diamonds?" I once asked, and she said, "Why have them if they're not?