Top 100 Elizabeth Berg Quotes
#1. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#2. 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?
Elizabeth Berg
#3. 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
#5. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#6. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#7. There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.
Elizabeth Berg
#8. The truth is, aging can be your realest opportunity to decide how best to live - and the best incentive for getting you to do just that.
Elizabeth Berg
#9. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#10. She prefers cats to dogs, which is almost worse than being a conservative.
Elizabeth Berg
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#16. I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.
Elizabeth Berg
#17. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#18. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#19. I don't think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.
Elizabeth Berg
#20. For all that we might be, if only we'd let ourselves.
Elizabeth Berg
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. It will happen when you're not looking for it. Love likes to take you by surprise.
Elizabeth Berg
#26. Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness.
Elizabeth Berg
#28. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#29. 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?
Elizabeth Berg
#30. Every day, Helen thought, so many people tap the bull on the shoulder and say, Excuse me. I'm just going to grab your horns.
Elizabeth Berg
#31. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#32. Always pick the thing that is not a chain, is one way to try to save the world.
Elizabeth Berg
#33. He resents the very posture of people who are online, the way they bend their backs over their various devices, blocking out any possibility that they might engage with a real live person, who would never come with enough apps to satisfy them,
Elizabeth Berg
#34. As a writer, you should have a sticky soul; the act of continually taking things in should be as much a part of you as your hair color.
Elizabeth Berg
#35. Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you
Elizabeth Berg
#36. 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
#37. 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
Elizabeth Berg
#38. And there is such honesty and innocence to her voice I want to hold her. The bedside lamplight is a rich golden color, and it is falling on her face in a way that makes it seem gilded. For a moment, L.D. looks to me like an angel. Another case of illusion only being the larger truth.
Elizabeth Berg
#39. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#41. 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!
Elizabeth Berg
#42. 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
#43. *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
#44. 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
#45. Nobody knows what goes on in other families, because families lie about themselves to other people. Not only to other people but to one another. And to themselves.
Elizabeth Berg
#46. 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
#48. It's not that he doesn't smile; it's that if his smile were something you drew, you'd erase it, thinking, Wrong.
Elizabeth Berg
#49. The person with the bleeding finger doesn't hurt less for the person next to him with the bleeding arm.
Elizabeth Berg
#50. As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.
Elizabeth Berg
#51. 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
#53. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#54. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#55. This is the way things work sometimes, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now let's go ahead and let her have it all.
Elizabeth Berg
#56. I think the reason we're cruel sometimes is that we're afraid we're going to like something.
Elizabeth Berg
#57. I understood, that he was right in asking to be cremated. For if he was nowhere, he could be everywhere. As in, with me.
Elizabeth Berg
#58. That summer rain I mean that is so quiet and matter of fact and falls straight down like a curtain. Now
Elizabeth Berg
#60. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#61. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#62. Wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.
Elizabeth Berg
#63. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I don't think Martha's so bad. I think I want her for a friend instead of you. When I look at her magazine, I feel soothed. When I talk to you, I feel like hanging myself.
Elizabeth Berg
#68. 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
#69. A human being writes the book, but what writes for him or her is more spirit than physical being, and that spirit lives only in solitude.
Elizabeth Berg
#70. 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
#71. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#72. 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
#73. I look in the mirror now, and even if I lost weight, there's just ... Theres' nothing I can do. It's over. My bodyness. My attractiveness in my body. I can diet forever but it will never make me like I was.
Elizabeth Berg
#74. These yanks into someone's personal past, that's the kind of history I like. Not wars, but who was your grandmother and what did she dream of? Did she walk up stairs to where she lived and what did it smell like and what was she wearing and who were her neighbors?
Elizabeth Berg
#75. My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.
Elizabeth Berg
#76. I felt my aloneness like a coat. You think you get used to death in the dying. But after the dying is done, you see how the end is the beginning.
Elizabeth Berg
#77. Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.
Elizabeth Berg
#78. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#79. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#80. Are these real diamonds?" I once asked, and she said, "Why have them if they're not?
Elizabeth Berg
#81. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#82. I hate banana bread. It's too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.
Elizabeth Berg
#83. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#84. ...(we) laughed. It was so good to laugh. I felt as though I too were reentering my legitimate self.
Elizabeth Berg
#85. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#86. There's nothing like getting in trouble to make you feel young.
Elizabeth Berg
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.
Elizabeth Berg
#91. I also think you should take care of yourself. You can crack up a little when these things go on for so long. You've got to bring a healthy self in here. That will help him most. He needs to feel your strength. And you need to do what you have to keep it.
Elizabeth Berg
#92. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#93. Or he could go back to the ease of solitude. It's really not so bad, being alone, never worrying about what has to be done for, or with, or in the interest of another. it's like you let your mind stay in its pajamas all day.
Elizabeth Berg
#94. What does anyone say to anybody who used to be so important in her life, whom she's not seen in such a long time? It seems to me that in situations like this, we're all wondering the same thing: I'm still me; are you still you? A
Elizabeth Berg
#95. When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.
Elizabeth Berg
#96. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#97. Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.
Elizabeth Berg
#98. 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
#99. For a long time, we have known that sometimes it serves you best simply to work around an obstacle, to make invisible what you are tired of seeing or don't understand.
Elizabeth Berg
#100. It feels like some part of me that was curled down and waiting in the dark has risen, and now stands stretching and strong in the sunshine. I knew it.
Elizabeth Berg
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