Elizabeth Berg Quotes & Sayings

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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 — Elizabeth Berg

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

There was in it a moment of indignity, nearly comedic - a feeling that I had lost my balance. But I had not. — Elizabeth Berg

How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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

I was sitting at my desk one day, my head in my hands, and I had that middle ache that is just the pain that comes with being alive sometimes, that kind of personal despair. — Elizabeth Berg

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

Oh, why isn't there a Community Center for People Who Need a Little Something? If people would only tell the truth about the way they felt, it would be busy all the time. There could be folding chairs arranged in groups, people sitting there saying, "I don't know, I just wanted to come here for a while." I — Elizabeth Berg

...And indeed it did take me a long time for me to find someone I wanted to marry. But I'm so glad I waited. What I know about Pete and me is that the flame will never go out. I do not look up from tossing the salad and think, Oh, God, how the hell did I ever get here? I do not look a the back of his head and think, I don't know you at all. I wake up with my pal, and go to sleep with my lover. He still thrills me, not only sexually but because of the way he regards the life that unfolds around him. I am interested in what he says about me and the children and our respective jobs, but I am also interested in what he says about the Middle East and the migratory patterns of monarchs and the amount of nutmeg that should be grated into the mashed potatoes and the impact that being a thwarted artist had on the life of Hitler. I believe he is a truly honest and awake and kind individual. If we live more than once, I want to find him again. — Elizabeth Berg

Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed
with a vague sadness. A longing for a speci??c kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of
shame. She knows it's nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she
never had. — Elizabeth Berg

I hate banana bread. It's too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs. — Elizabeth Berg

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

I'm sorry! It's just that it hurts so much and it never stops! — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

I once read that Martha Stewart never wears a bathrobe. Not that I like Martha Stewart, nobody likes Martha Stewart, I don't think even Martha Stewart likes Martha Stewart. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

I remember once when we were moving, driving across country, and it was raining so hard, the windshield wipers going fast and squeaking, and then: nothing. It stopped. I looked out the window ahead of me and it was clear. I looked out the back and there was the rain, still going. Nobody said anything, but there it was, a near miracle, a rain line, a way of seeing just where something starts, when usually you are just in the middle of it before you notice it. That's how it feels to me now, to not want to be like (that) anymore. I see the line. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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? — Elizabeth Berg

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

Don't let your habits become handcuffs — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

There's nothing like getting in trouble to make you feel young. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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

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

Healing hurts, but hurting heals. — Elizabeth Berg

The greatest understanding of a thing is when you can't reduce it any further — Elizabeth Berg

A family is no place for privacy! — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you'll stay in a place you've outgrown. When — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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

Our own individual life history is also shaped that way. In large part, when you factor out fate, what we are is because of what we believe about ourselves. Wherever we are in the world, we mostly live in the small space between our ears. — Elizabeth Berg

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels. — Elizabeth Berg

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? — Elizabeth Berg

There is love in holding and there is love in letting go. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type
it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

Books are like confort food without the calories — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that's what it is, one after the other. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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. — Elizabeth Berg

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time. — Elizabeth Berg

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. — Elizabeth Berg

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

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

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

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

But now, sitting on this airplane on my way back to the life I went on to fashion after she left, I think of her differently. I see her so many ways: sitting back on her heels at the side of the bathtub, singing softly as she washes Sharla and my backs; watching at the window for the six o'clock arrival of our father; wrapping Christmas presents on the wide expanse of her bed; biting her lip as she stood before the open cupboards, making out the grocery list; leaning out the kitchen window that last summer to call Sharla and me in for supper. Most clearly, though, I see her sitting at the kitchen table, in her old, usual spot. There is a cup of coffee before her, but she doesn't drink it. Instead, she stares out the window. I see the sharp angle of her cheekbone, the beautiful whitish down at the side of face, illuminated by the sun. Her hands are quiet, resting in the cloth bowl of her apron. She sits still as a statue - waiting, I can see now; she was always waiting. -What We Keep — Elizabeth Berg