Top 38 Lucia Berlin Quotes
#1. I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie.
Lucia Berlin
#2. Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.
Lucia Berlin
#3. The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me.
Lucia Berlin
#4. Just ignore him," Dixie said. "He's incorrigible."
"No way, mama. Encourage me all you want.
Lucia Berlin
#5. Death is healing, it tells us to forgive, it reminds us that we don't want to die alone.
Lucia Berlin
#6. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn't feel?
Lucia Berlin
#7. Most American women are very uncomfortable about having servants. They don't know what to do while you are there.
Lucia Berlin
#8. My legs! Lord Jesus stop the pain in my legs!"
"Hush John," Florida said. "That's only phantom pain."
"Is it real?" I asked her.
She shrugged. "All pain is real.
Lucia Berlin
#9. As a rule, never work for friends. Sooner or later they resent you because you know so much about them. Or else you'll no longer like them, because you do.)
Lucia Berlin
#10. She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or an advertisement.
Lucia Berlin
#11. The people who were content with each other spoke as little as those who bristled with resentment or boredom; it was the rhythm of their speech that differed, like a lazy tennis ball batted back and forth or the quick swattings of a fly. *
Lucia Berlin
#12. I'll bet the Catholic Church lost out on a lot of would-be nuns when they started dressing like ordinary meter maids.
Lucia Berlin
#14. (Advice to cleaning women: Take everything that your lady gives you and say Thank you. You can leave it on the bus, in the crack.)
Lucia Berlin
#15. Her smile, though, no, it was her laugh, a dusky, deep cascading laughter that caught the joy, implied and mocked the sorrow in every joy.
Lucia Berlin
#16. I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.
Lucia Berlin
#17. they say a baby's true babtism occurs when hefirst falls out of bed
Lucia Berlin
#18. There was panic in my eyes. I looked into my own eyes and back down at my hands. Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands. His
Lucia Berlin
#19. Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.
Lucia Berlin
#20. Whenever Ter read a book, rarely - he would rip each page off and throw it away. I would come home, to where the windows were always open or broken and the whole room would be swirling with pages, like Safeway lot pigeons. 33
Lucia Berlin
#21. I love houses, all the things they tell me, so that's one reason. I don't mind working as a cleaning woman. It's just like reading a book.
Lucia Berlin
#22. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.
Lucia Berlin
#23. She wiped the mirror so she could look at herself. Mediocre and grim, she thought. Not mediocre, her face, with wide gray eyes, fine nose and smile, but it was grim. A good body, but so long disregarded it seemed grim too.
Lucia Berlin
#24. The moon. There's no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow.
Lucia Berlin
#25. God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame.
Lucia Berlin
#26. What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window? How wondrous to watch ourselves. Joggers would job even harder, blood pumping away. Lovers would love more. God damn! Look at that old semen go! Diets would improve-- kiwi fruit and strawberries, borscht with sour cream.
Lucia Berlin
#27. When your parents are dead your own death faces you.
Lucia Berlin
#28. I'm having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.
Lucia Berlin
#29. Watcha gonna do when I'm gone, Maggie?...
I'll do macrame, punk
Lucia Berlin
#30. One thing I do know about death. The "better" the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person's death makes.
Lucia Berlin
#31. I don't think I ever really liked the world until I met him.
Lucia Berlin
#32. The Campus laundry has a sign, like most laundries do, POSITIVELY NO DYEING. I drove all over town with a green bedspread until I came to Angel's with his yellow sign, YOU CAN DIE HERE ANYTIME.
Lucia Berlin
#33. There was no way I could explain that it had all happened so fast, that I wasn't smiling away at the cats chewing the birds. It was that my happiness about the sweet peas and the finches hadn't had time to fade. As
Lucia Berlin
#34. (Cleaning women: You will get a lot of liberated women. First stage is a CR group; second stage is a cleaning woman; third, divorce.)
Lucia Berlin
#35. Mrs. Bevins smiled. "Okay. I'll cop. I think every teacher sees this sometimes. It's not simply intelligence or talent. It's a nobility of spirit. A quality which could make him great at whatever he wanted to do." We
Lucia Berlin
#36. Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.
Lucia Berlin
#37. Women's voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning women or cats.
Lucia Berlin
#38. The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.
Lucia Berlin
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