Elizabeth Berg > Quotes

“There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“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, The Art of Mending

“I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“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

“You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending

“Don't let your habits become handcuffs”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“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, Joy School

“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, The Year of Pleasures

“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, Talk Before Sleep

“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, What We Keep

“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, Talk Before Sleep

“Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“Sometimes you know before you know.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Range of Motion

“Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.”
― Elizabeth Berg, True to Form

“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, The Year of Pleasures

“books are like confort food without the calories”
― Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe

“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, We Are All Welcome Here

“I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Pull of the Moon

“Well, most women are full to the brim, that's all...We are, most of us, ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with "Mommy" embroidered over the left breast, over the heart...If a stranger had come up to me and said, "Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen," I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Pull of the Moon

“When it's new and important, you have to rest in between times. And anyway, even when I like a person there is a weariness that comes. I can be with someone and everything is fine and then all of a sudden it can wash over me like a sickness, that I need the quiet of my own self. I need to unload my head and look at what I've got in there so far. See it. Think what it means. I always need to come back to being alone for a while.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Joy School

“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, The Year of Pleasures

“There is love in holding, and there is love in letting go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation

“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, Talk Before Sleep

“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

“She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe

“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, The Year of Pleasures

“Well, anyway, her death changed our lives for the better, because it brought a kind of awareness, a specific sense of purpose and appreciation we hadn't had before. Would I trade that in order to have her back? In a fraction of a millisecond. But I won't ever have her back. So I have taken this, as her great gift to us. But. Do I block her out? Never. Do I think of her? Always. In some part of my brain, I think of her every single moment of every single day.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures