Top 100 Elizabeth Berg Quotes
#1. The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.
Frances Mayes
#2. I don't know. It depends on the day. Depends on the hour of the day ... I don't really know if I really want to do that. I think I do and then I think I don't. It makes me really nervous to think about really doing it.
Elizabeth Berg
#3. First of all, I want you to know that I believed in the cause for which I died. No war is won without sacrifice.
Elizabeth Berg
#4. 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
#5. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#6. I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.
Elizabeth Berg
#7. But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.
Elizabeth Berg
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. This is life, uh? We lose something here; we get something there. The trick is to stop looking in the old place to find the new thing.
Elizabeth Berg
#13. 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
#14. She put her hand over her heart. Oh boy. It hurts. It's a real pain. Right here.
Elizabeth Berg
#15. 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
#16. There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.
Elizabeth Berg
#17. 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
#18. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#19. 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
#20. She prefers cats to dogs, which is almost worse than being a conservative.
Elizabeth Berg
#21. 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
#23. Don't ask so many questions. You always ask so many questions. Don't do that. Just...accept things.
...Don't ask questions and don't look back. Believe me you'll be much more content.
Elizabeth Berg
#24. You feel the call. That's the important thing. Now answer it as fully as you can. Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.
Elizabeth Berg
#25. I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.
Elizabeth Berg
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#29. But at one point, one of the women sighed and leaned her head against the bus window, and said, "Ah, you know. My one and only yous." Her friend laughed. "It's my one and only you." The other woman said, "No it isn't.
Elizabeth Berg
#30. Here is the knowledge, so easy and mean: find what they love and wreck it. Simple.
Elizabeth Berg
#31. 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
#33. I used to make a basket of my hands to hold a feeling of joy that came upon me, then flatten my hands against my chest as if to make it part of me. Not understanding that it already was.
Elizabeth Berg
#34. I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.
Elizabeth Berg
#35. Make time for prayer and reflection; try to understand your value as a man on earth but see, too, your proper place in the scheme of things. It may sound funny to say this, but I have come to see that we are all far more important and less important than we think.
Elizabeth Berg
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. For all that we might be, if only we'd let ourselves.
Elizabeth Berg
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Did she ever think of that, that things experienced in ways different from hers were equally valuable? That the way that he chose to love her was, in fact, loving her, that the face of love depended on the person giving it?
Elizabeth Berg
#43. The greatest understanding of a thing is when you can't reduce it any further
Elizabeth Berg
#45. 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
#46. It will happen when you're not looking for it. Love likes to take you by surprise.
Elizabeth Berg
#47. Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness.
Elizabeth Berg
#50. Ruth has friends like other people have wardrobes. I mean that there's someone for every occasion.
Elizabeth Berg
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.
Elizabeth Berg
#56. 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
#57. There I was, waiting, afraid I'd never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.
Elizabeth Berg
#58. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#59. Outside, the rain sometimes comes down so hard, we have to talk louder, and it feels like a miracle that the roof holds. It makes for a coziness and a gratefulness, too, that you have the choice to not be out in it. You can sit at the table and look out the window and not have to feel what you see.
Elizabeth Berg
#60. Always pick the thing that is not a chain, is one way to try to save the world.
Elizabeth Berg
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you
Elizabeth Berg
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. You know before you know, of course. You are bending over the dryer, pulling out the still-warm sheets, and the knowledge walks up your backbone. You stare at the man you love and you are staring at nothing; he is gone before he is gone.
Elizabeth Berg
#69. You once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
Elizabeth Berg
#70. 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
#71. Right, I'll bet he's another vegetarian. Another Unitarian vegetarian who holds up peace signs at street corners every Saturday afternoon and aspires to live in a Mongolian yurt.
Elizabeth Berg
#72. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#74. Willow trees dipped their bare branches into pond water like girls testing the temperature with their toes.
Elizabeth Berg
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that's what it is, one after the other.
Elizabeth Berg
#78. *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
#79. Isn't it really true that life is so beautiful because it's so fleeting and fragile?
Elizabeth Berg
#80. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#81. I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?
Elizabeth Berg
#82. 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
#83. Who doesn't long for one more time of seeing someone they've loved and lost? And yet what would you say, what would you do, if it were possible?
Elizabeth Berg
#84. 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
#85. I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.
Elizabeth Berg
#86. 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
#87. I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.
Elizabeth Berg
#89. 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.
Elizabeth Berg
#90. 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
#91. The person with the bleeding finger doesn't hurt less for the person next to him with the bleeding arm.
Elizabeth Berg
#92. As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.
Elizabeth Berg
#93. 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
#95. I don't hold Travis anymore, of course- not to read to him, or for any other reason, either. I wish I'd known that the last time was going to be the last time.
Elizabeth Berg
#96. 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
#97. When did After start? I don't remember it starting. I only remember it having arrived. Things were bad for such a long time before he left. But I miss him. I can feel loneliness in my like circulation; as constant and as irrefutable.
Elizabeth Berg
#98. I sit in some long grass, watch for a while to see if I can find some ants working. The thing about watching ants is, you see some order and elegance to the whole works. And also is it a time of you wondering who is higher, really. But
Elizabeth Berg
#99. You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.
Elizabeth Berg
#100. How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything.
Elizabeth Berg
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