Lucia Berlin Quotes & Sayings

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

I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie. — Lucia Berlin

(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

It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I'll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it's more likely I'll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty.... It's not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf. — Lucia Berlin

Women's voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning women or cats. — Lucia Berlin

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

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

shutters as old as Herman Melville. — Lucia Berlin

I don't think I ever really liked the world until I met him. — Lucia Berlin

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

Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc. — Lucia Berlin

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

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

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

The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time. — Lucia Berlin

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

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

Just ignore him," Dixie said. "He's incorrigible."
"No way, mama. Encourage me all you want. — Lucia Berlin

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

Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five. Time — Lucia Berlin

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

Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the lobe on the desk... The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time. — Lucia Berlin

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

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

Sally wasn't crying about their dead mother or her cancer. She was crying because her husband, Alfonso, had left her after twenty years for a young woman. It seemed a brutal thing to do, just after her mastectomy. She was devastated, but no, she wouldn't ever divorce him, even though the woman was pregnant and he wanted to marry her.

"They can just wait until I die. I'll be dead soon, probably next year..." Sally wept but the ocean drowned out the sound. — Lucia Berlin

Most American women are very uncomfortable about having servants. They don't know what to do while you are there. — Lucia Berlin

(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

She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or an advertisement. — Lucia Berlin

The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me. — Lucia Berlin

Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool. — Lucia Berlin

Ter refused to ride buses. The people depressed him, sitting there. He liked Greyhound stations though. We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue. He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs. — Lucia Berlin

Watcha gonna do when I'm gone, Maggie?...

I'll do macrame, punk — Lucia Berlin

they say a baby's true babtism occurs when hefirst falls out of bed — Lucia Berlin

God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame. — Lucia Berlin

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

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

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

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

I like my job in emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God--because it'll be hours before X-Ray or Demerol. Maybe I'm morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp's back. I like the fact, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not. — Lucia Berlin

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

When your parents are dead your own death faces you. — Lucia Berlin

Mrs. Armitage had been different, although she was old too. That was in New York at the San Juan Laundry on Fifteenth Street. Puerto Ricans. Suds overflowing onto the floor. I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn't see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays. — Lucia Berlin

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

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

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

...back to the USA where there is honor and integrity and Lord knows what else, I thought. I got confused. President Bush and Clarence Thomas and antiabortion and AIDS and Duke and crack and homelessness. And everywhere, MTV, cartoons ads, magazines--just war and sexism and violence. In Mexico, at least a can of cement falls off a scaffold on your head, no Uzis or anything personal. — Lucia Berlin

Death is healing, it tells us to forgive, it reminds us that we don't want to die alone. — Lucia Berlin