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.

Don't let your habits become handcuffs

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

We're so far away from those stars

A family is no place for privacy!

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.

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

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.

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.

What girls do to each other is beyond description. No Chinese torture comes close.

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.

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.

I wish I could leave a trail of gratefulness behind me that you could see, glowing thanks. I would pay to see stars, but I never have to. This to me is one of those miracles.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

No, love is never foolish. Or unnecessary

I miss you,” he says. “I still miss you, sweetheart. Every day is like the first day I lost you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.

I just don't know anymore. God! I'm in a bad mood! It's like walking around in an itchy coat.

If a summer were a girl, she'd always be lying stretched out in the grass in a long white dress, her arms over her head, her eyes half closed.

The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths.

there's always a hope, you never know.

Here is the knowledge, so easy and mean: find what they love and wreck it. Simple.

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.

The person with the bleeding finger doesn't hurt less for the person next to him with the bleeding arm.

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels." Marsha thinks about this. Then she says, "Not true." "I know," Tom says, and sighs.

Willow trees dipped their bare branches into pond water like girls testing the temperature with their toes.

For what reason would I lie to one I so love?

Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness.

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

I like to do things in bed. I fold the laundry on the bed. Food tastes better to me when I'm under the covers. Bed is the only place to read, the best place to talk on the phone.

Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can’t control them coming in. But you don’t have to let them all out.

I don’t think it’s foolish. I don’t think love is ever foolish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

Martha Raye slipped up to the colonel and she said, 'Sir, where do we eat?' He said, 'You mess with the men.' 'I know that,' she said, 'but where do we eat?

What mattered was that at the end, someone who loved her sat by her, saying, I see you. I

Funny how an animal can hurt your feelings when you’re all alone.

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.

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.

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

I tell you, I will never understand the mystery of love. A woman comes to a man because she wants only him; then she cannot bear the sound of air moving in and out of his nostrils. She cannot bear the sight of his shadow upon the pavement!

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.

´´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.´´

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, well, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don’t mind it, Lucille. I don’t feel useless. I feel lucky.

sometimes he just can’t help but think that there really is a grand plan. In a way, it reminds him of square dancing, how you can see the pattern fully only by looking at it from above, by not being a part of it.

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?

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.

But losing weight for health reasons is a very dull prospect, doomed at the outset. Losing weight for romance, that’s altogether different.

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.

...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.

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

Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.

Do you guys ever think about how Hitler has affected the whole world? That just one man did all this? I mean, what if he had been a good man, instead?

For all that we might be, if only we'd let ourselves.

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

My sounds [crying] were small and muffled but obvious. No one paid any attention. It was the way we had become. In a world full of sorrows, this was only one more.

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

It's funny how, oftentimes, the people you love the most are given the least margin for error.

Nothing will brings lovers closer together than people trying to keep them apart.

Never think winter will last when spring is equally inevitable.

I do not believe the loss of a child is something one ever overcomes. One puts on the faces one needs, but inside, one bleeds and bleeds.

Well, I was just going to say that it seems one of the things you have to do in order to finally grow up is to let that what-my-parents-did-to-me stuff go.

What mattered was that at the end, someone who loved her sat by her, saying, I see you.

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.

The important thing is to keep trying. And to apologize when you need to.

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.

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.

It seemed impossible that men with hearts and brains were capable of it. Such devastation of cities, so many innocent lives lost. It seemed to him that if just a small part of the effort put into war could be put into peace, they'd be so much better off

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 am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding.

He tells her that, when Nola first died, he thought he’d die himself, of the sorrow. He says he’d read that grief has a catabolic effect and he thought for sure it would take him right out, this immense and gnawing pain, that it would eat him alive from the inside out. But it didn’t. It took a long time for him to shift things around so that he could still love and honor Nola but also love and honor life, but it happened. And it will happen to her.

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.

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

real love is when the other person is your best friend and you shouldn’t have to work hard around them, it should be, like, more natural, and you just want to be with them even if you’re not doing anything.

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.

She goes back to bed, turns out the light, and can hear herself start to snore before she falls off into sleep. She doesn’t know why so many people hate snoring. She finds it soothing. White noise, with a ruffle.

I think the kind of love that comes after romantic love is the best, richest love of all. At some point, I think we all want someone we can look ugly around, reveal our vulnerabilities to, and, most important, trust. And as a former nurse, I found that when people are at their most vulnerable, at their “ugliest,” is when they’re the most beautiful. In this novel, I think true love is saying, “I see you wholly and I love you anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 wasn't sure it was right to abandon myself to lighthearted banter, to allow someone to interfere with my being able to behave in whatever way I chose, whenever I wanted. What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn't weaned from that yet; I wasn't finished being with him in the only way I had left.

From an airplane, the earth always looks so orderly, so gentle. So full of abundance and grace and purposeful intelligence. By day you could marvel at the precise patterns of cultivated fields. At night, you could see clusters of lights, showing an obvious need for people to be near one another. Who would not be moved, looking down from such a distance, at the evidence of our great intentions?

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? ??????????

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.

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.

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.

Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can't control them coming in, but you don't have to let them all out. That's the crux of it.

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.

This is not a novel about a woman leaving home, but rather a human being finding her way back.

Those who say life is a glorious blessing are right. Those who say it is endlessly cruel are also right.

Some things come true. They might come true in ways different than we might have predicted, but some things do come true

No, love is never foolish. Or unnecessary.

He tells her that, when Nola first died, he thought he’d die himself, of the sorrow.

Silence, and then, "How old are you?" Maddy asks, and Arthur tells her eighty-five. Then he asks her how old she is. "Eighteen," she says. "Almost." Eighteen. The word is a poem.

How is it that we dare to honk at others in traffic, when we know nothing about where they have just come from or what they are on their way to?

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

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.

She doesn’t exactly know why kids don’t like her. She’s good-looking enough. She has a sense of humor. She’s not dumb. She guesses it’s because they can sense how much she needs them. They are like kids in a circle holding sticks, picking on the weak thing. It is in people, to be entertained by cruelty.

The owner was this very thin woman who looked sort of bitchy, which, think about it, most very thin women do-even when they smile, it's like grimacing. Fat people are often miserable too, but at least they LOOK jolly even though it's really mostly them apologizing, like, "Sorry, sorry, sorry I'm offending your idea of bodily aesthetics," "Sorry I'm clogging my arteries and giving the thumbs-up to diabetes.

Yes, life is a minefield at any age. Sometimes we feel pretty certain that we know what's coming. But really, we never do. We just walk on. We have to. If we are smart we count our blessings between the darker surprises.

...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.

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.

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.

But what we need are readers. Right? Where would writers be without readers? Who are they going to write for? And actors, what are they without an audience? 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,

Steven sits back in the booth, crosses his arms. “My wife was cremated.” “Your wife…?” “She died when Maddy was two weeks old.” “Oh, my. My goodness. That’s a hard one. Boy, oh, boy. That must have been hard.” “It never goes away. Never does.” Arthur leans forward. “The pain, you mean?

What if you determined to fin one thing every day that you -... I know. Count your blessings. Remind yourself every night of every good thing that happened to you that day. No. I'm not talking about things that happen to you. I'm talking about purposefully doing one thing that brings you happiness every single day, in a very conscious way. .......think of it more fluidly-as a philosophy that you exercise daily. And days turn into years. And then years turn into a lifetime.

He hesitates, then turns and starts up her walk. Gives her a friendly smile, to boot. He wishes she wouldn’t wear a wig, or at least not one that sits so crookedly on her head. It’s a distraction. Sometimes he has to restrain himself from reaching over and giving it a little tug, then smacking her knee in a friendly way and saying, “There you go!” But why risk humiliating her?

He says, "Nola once told me she wished people could be stars in the sky and look down on those that they loved. I always wished that could be so. Let's you and I pretend it's true, even if it isn't, would that be okay with you?" Madly nods, her throat tight. "And after I die, why, you look up in the sky for two stars, real close together. That will be Nola and me. Those stars will be so close together, it'll look like they are one, but they'll be two. Me, and then just to my right, Nola. Look up at us sometimes." "I will," Maddy says, "I promise. But you're not going anywhere yet.

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 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.

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.

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.

Hey. Know what happened to me today?" He sits back and crosses his arms, smiles. "No. What happened to you today?" "Well, I decided to take the bus to work instead of driving? And I got on and I sat behind this woman who started crying. She was very quiet about it, just every now and then she would reach up and wipe away a tear. She had this kerchief on her head, this ratty old flowered kerchief, but it was clean and it was tied very neatly, you know. And she had her purse on her lap and she was holding on to it like it was hands. At first nobody else seemed to notice she was crying, but then everybody around her did. And it got very quiet. And then finally this man got up from the back of the bus, and he came up and sat next to her and put his arm around her, and he didn't say a word, but just stared straight ahead with his arm around her and she kept crying, but it was better now, you could tell, she kind of had a little smile even though she was still crying. And I don't know if he even knew her! I think everybody was wondering the same thing: Does he even know her? I guess he must have known her; otherwise she probably would have leaped up and started screaming or something, but you never know! You just never know, it might have been someone whose heart went out to her because she was crying. And he decided he would comfort her. And she let him. And I think it was a kind of miracle. A living parable or something.