Elizabeth Berg Quotes

You don't do so well with marriage. I don't think you've begun to realize all there is for you to love. And I know you better than anyone & here's what I know about you: You have so much love to give! But I feel like you're all the time digging in the tomato bin, saying, Where are the apples? ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

I decided in high school that I wasn't going to get married too soon. I'd forgotten that you can also wait too long, and then the only candies left in the box are the squished ones, rejected for their questionable insides. And if I'm honest, I'd have to count myself among those with questionable insides. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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 ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything. ~ Elizabeth Berg

...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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn't. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

I used to make a basket of my hands to hold a feeling of joy that came upon me, then flatten my hands against my chest as if to make it part of me. Not understanding that it already was. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

Did she ever think of that, that things experienced in ways different from hers were equally valuable? That the way that he chose to love her was, in fact, loving her, that the face of love depended on the person giving it? ~ Elizabeth Berg

If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I'd ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, "It's all right," I said, quickly. "It's all right." To whom? I wondered later. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Already I've seen that when you're pulled away from your normal routine, it's as though air and sunlight come into your brain and do a little housecleaning. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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 ~ Elizabeth Berg

Don't let your habits become handcuffs ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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? ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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? ~ Elizabeth Berg

You know, sometimes marriage is iron. Sometimes it's tissue paper. And I
think the times it's tissue paper are when you need to keep things to yourself. Or you can end up making a mistake that you'll regret forever. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

I remember once when we were moving, driving across country, and it was raining so hard, the windshield wipers going fast and squeaking, and then: nothing. It stopped. I looked out the window ahead of me and it was clear. I looked out the back and there was the rain, still going. Nobody said anything, but there it was, a near miracle, a rain line, a way of seeing just where something starts, when usually you are just in the middle of it before you notice it. That's how it feels to me now, to not want to be like (that) anymore. I see the line. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Sometimes you know before you know. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

Human beings. They are the ones with the most important job. They are supposed to make what they want out of what they are given. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

She understood the specific kind of appreciation that comes to a person witnessing a thing of beauty alone, how the spectacle seems to sit whole inside the soul, undiminished by conversation, by any attempt at translation or persuasion. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

There are guys bleeding to death who don't know it, they're smiling, they're talking, they don't feel pain because they're in shock, they ask you for some water and then they're dead. On D-day I ran past a guy lying on his spilled guts with his eyes closed and his thumb in his mouth. Eisenhower's speech had been read to us over the loudspeaker by our commander when we crossed the channel that morning. What valor and inspiration were in his words- all about how we were embarked on a great crusade, that the hopes and prayers of a liberty loving people were going with us ... I got gooseflesh when he asked for the blessing of almighty god on this great and noble undertaking. But how to reconcile that with spilled guts on a beach and flies in the eyes of some dead nineteen year old kid who traded his life for some words on paper? ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

It feels strange to see him; it's been a while. I feel as though I need to meet him all over again. ~ Elizabeth Berg

When did After start? I don't remember it starting. I only remember it having arrived. Things were bad for such a long time before he left. But I miss him. I can feel loneliness in my like circulation; as constant and as irrefutable. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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

I sit on the bed and think how life is never safe and they should tell you that right off the bat. Things happen out of order and just plain wrong, and there is not one thing you can do about it. The message of every morning is? ?????????? ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

I push pain away all day, and the moment I put my arms down it walks into me and has a seat. I ~ Elizabeth Berg

Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that's what it is, one after the other. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

*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

I was sitting at my desk one day, my head in my hands, and I had that middle ache that is just the pain that comes with being alive sometimes, that kind of personal despair. ~ Elizabeth Berg

There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if many of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you'll stay in a place you've outgrown. When ~ Elizabeth Berg

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? ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

I sit in some long grass, watch for a while to see if I can find some ants working. The thing about watching ants is, you see some order and elegance to the whole works. And also is it a time of you wondering who is higher, really. But ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels. ~ Elizabeth Berg

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Right, I'll bet he's another vegetarian. Another Unitarian vegetarian who holds up peace signs at street corners every Saturday afternoon and aspires to live in a Mongolian yurt. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

We're so far away from those stars ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

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. ~ Elizabeth Berg