Elizabeth Berg Quotes

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

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

You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are...off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart.

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.

You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.

Don't let your habits become handcuffs

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

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.

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.

Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.

Sometimes you know before you know.

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.

Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.

books are like confort food without the calories

I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.

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

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.

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

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.

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.

I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.

You don't get everything all at once. You wait.

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

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.

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.

There are some things you never say good-bye to

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

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.

I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.

It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.

What is it that makes a family? Certainly no document does, no legal pronouncement or accident of birth. No, real families come from choices we make about who we want to be bound to, and the ties to such families live in our hearts.

I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?

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.

She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.

Well, most women are full to the brim, that's all...We are, most of us, ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with "Mommy" embroidered over the left breast, over the heart...If a stranger had come up to me and said, "Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen," I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it.

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.

I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.

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 who don’t feel cared for are not always comfortable being cared for.

Everybody makes mistakes, sometimes even before we get up in the morning. We can’t help but make mistakes. The important thing is to keep trying. And to apologize when you need to.

Oh, Arthur, no one even sees you when you get old except for people who knew you when you were young.

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.

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.

I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.

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

Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.

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

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.

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.

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

Arthur thinks that, above all, aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.

Well, I’ve said it often enough to others: there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you’ll stay in a place you’ve outgrown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A family is no place for privacy!

We're so far away from those stars

I'll love you forever in darkness and sun, I'll love you past when my whole sweet life is done.

I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we're all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it's a major design flaw. We ought to be able to say, Here, look what I am. I think it would be quite a relief.

*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.

Frank, saying, Who cares what happens before we’re born and after we die? The question is, what do we do in the meantime?

Sometimes I wonder what the world would sound like if everybody stopped their complaining. It sure would be a quiet place.

The one to tell. The one to be told by. For him, that was marriage.

People are stupid. Why are they so stupid? There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed: love and be loved. Follow it and you’re happy. Fight against it and you’re not. It’s so simple, it’s hard to understand.

How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way?

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.

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

I think it's a real gift to be able to say that what's in your life is enough. It seems most of us re always wanting more.

She honestly wondered sometimes which fate was worse, death or standing behind a curtain and looking out at the street at all the things you felt you could no longer have.

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.

I understand that he is made up of working cells, just like me--crowded and confused pieces of genius that have been tampered with and now, wounded, go along in the way that they are able.

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.

Actors, painters, dancers, comedians, even just ordinary people doing ordinary things, what are they without an audience of some sort? See, that's what I do. I am the audience. I am the witness, I am the great appreciator that's what I do and that's all I want to do. I worked for a lot of years. I did a lot of things for a lot of years. Now, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don't mind it, Lucille. I don't feel useless. I feel lucky.

Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.

Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.

If you see a sunset and try to 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 saw, they swallow it, and it blooms again inside their own hearts.

It seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true visions when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.

Oh just wait. It takes a lot of time, that's all...You'll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you've ever had. A certain richness happens only later in life. I guess its' a kind of mellowing. p 80 talking about marriage and husbands

It's amazing how smart the body is. Though maybe we could do without loving. I think it's overrated, and I think it's too hard. You should only love your children; that is necessary, because otherwise you might kill them. But to love a man? It's overrated, and it's too hard and I will never, ever do it again.

Oh. maybe little kids are trouble, sometimes, but only for a good reason: They are tired. They are hungry. They are afraid. He supposes a great many ills of adults might be cured by a nap or a good meal or a bit of timely reassurance. But adults complicate everything. They are by nature complicators. They learned to make things harder than they need to be and they learned to talk way too much.

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.

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.

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.

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

I’ve never regretted doing anything in my life as much as I’ve regretted not doing it. There were a few times when in my heart I knew the right thing to do, but I listened to other people, or I didn’t have the guts, or it didn’t make sense, or I don’t know.… There was some false voice inside posing as logic when it was really just my own fear talking. The times I didn’t stay true, didn’t stay congruent, I paid the price.

In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.

I was downstairs, reading." " Now?" I strained to see her face. She was smiling, it appeared. "Yes, now," she said. "It's nice, sometimes, to read in the middle of the night. The sky is so dark and soft-looking outside the window, all the stars out. You have just on light on, you know, and it seems to pour onto the page. Makes the book seem better. You are this little island, just up alone with a book. And you heard the night sounds of the house...It's so interesting to me, that sound. Time. The measure of it.

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.

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?

I just want to say one thing. If I ever write a novel again, it's going to be in defense of weak women, inept and codependent women. I'm going to talk about all the great movies and songs and poetry that focus on such women. I'm going to toast Blanche DuBois. I'm going to celebrate women who aren't afraid to show their need and their vulnerabilities. To be honest about how hard it can be to plow your way through a life that offers no guarantees about anything. I'm going to get on my metaphorical knees and thank women who fall apart, who cry and carry on and wail and wring their hands because you know what, Midge? We all need to cry. Thank God for women who can articulate their vulnerabilities and express what probably a lot of other people want to say and feel they can't. Those peoples' stronghold against falling apart themselves is the disdain they feel for women who do it for them. Strong. I'm starting to think that's as much a party line as anything else ever handed to women for their assigned roles. When do we get respect for our differences from men? Our strength is our weakness. Our ability to feel is our humanity. You know what? I'll bet if you talk to a hundred strong women, 99 of them would say 'I'm sick of being strong. I would like to be cared for. I would like someone else to make the goddamn decisions, I'm sick of making decisions.' I know this one woman who's a beacon of strength. A single mother who can do everything - even more than you, Midge. I ran into her not long ago and we went and got a coffee and you know what she told me? She told me that when she goes out to dinner with her guy, she asks him to order everything for her. Every single thing, drink to dessert. Because she just wants to unhitch. All of us dependent, weak women have the courage to do all the time what she can only do in a restaurant.