Elizabeth Berg > Quotes

“I'm just saying I think people are meant to be with people. You suffer in a marriage; but alone, you suffer more. Did you ever read that Mark Twain book "Extracts from Adam's Diary"? Adam thought Eve was a real pain in the ass, talking too much, looking at her reflection in the pond all the time, getting them expelled from Paradise, for Christ's sake! But what he said at the end was that he was better off living outside the Garden with Eve than inside it without her.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Once Upon a Time, There Was You

“bound to, and the ties to such families live in our hearts.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv

“don’t know why I can’t stop crying. Too much good news lately, I guess. Bad news I can handle. I expect bad news. I’ve dealt with bad news all my life. Good news makes me cry.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“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, Once Upon a Time, There Was You

“Didn’t I tell you about her? She stuck her fingers in her vagina and then rubbed the stuff behind her ears. She said it made the men crazy.” “That is so disgusting,” Alice says. “I know.” “God!” “I know.” “Did you try it?” she asks. “Of course.” “Did it work?” “Not for me.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Range of Motion

“Gretchen is sixty-nine years old and one of those former knockouts who just can’t stop mourning the loss of her looks. She admits that if she didn’t think God would punish her by making her die on the OR table—and if she could afford it—she’d have every bit of plastic surgery she could, head to toe. Gretchen knows she is shallow in this regard, but she kind of enjoys being shallow this way.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“As far as I am concerned, the balance between men and women is all wrong, and there seems little interest on the part of men for changing that. Men know that women need them, and because of that, they acquire an elevated self-confidence. Women, rather than acknowledging their own importance in a relationship, focus instead on their need for it, and in the process they lose their self-confidence. I search in vain for equality in a relationship, and for someone who will want all that I have to give. What is the answer, do you think?”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand

“Go about your business in the best way you know how, and love will find you. You know what they say: It’s like a butterfly—you do better letting it land on you than trying to capture it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Confession Club

“I'd learned enough about grieving to know that other ways of feeling would come back soon enough. 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

“Well, you just don't seem very...proud of me." He started to say that he was, but she interrupted him, saying, "Don't. It's like my saying you never say you love me, and your saying it then. It doesn't matter, then. It doesn't count.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Say When

“Don’t we all want company in some form, are we not attracted to the idea of a body beside us in a thunderstorm, or another voice to help decide on dinner, to share astonishment at the latest political buffoonery or appreciation for the lush sets on Downton Abbey? Are we not, at our most basic, social animals, people who need other people, whether we want to or not?”
― Elizabeth Berg, Tapestry of Fortunes

“what I felt in that embrace was the knowledge that she would never be able to raise me, not by herself.”
― Elizabeth Berg, We Are All Welcome Here

“If there’s one thing Lucille hates, it’s how science has to rain on whimsy’s parade:”
― Elizabeth Berg, Night of Miracles

“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, let’s face it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Once Upon a Time, There Was You

“A promise is a promise, even if it's only one you made to yourself.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv

“Joke or not, something is occurring to me. You live your life, and you get to ask for things, and sometimes they are given to you. Just”
― Elizabeth Berg, Tapestry of Fortunes

“Most important, my mother welcomed friends and strangers alike to her table. If you came home with someone you had just met on the street, she would share what she had with them, showing them the same face no matter who they were or where they came from. Her belief was this: No matter their station in life, people were united by virtue of their humanity. “We all rise to the same sun and sleep beneath the same moon,”she often told me. Only if someone was false or haughty or superior did she display her caustic side to them.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand

“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, The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand

“He stands to take his wallet out. Oh. He's short.
Well that's alright. What difference does it make? Okay it makes a little difference at first.”
― Elizabeth Berg

“certain life circumstances make for people who walk with a psychic limp for all of their days. Never mind the progress they seem to make, peel back a few delicate layers and there it is: a stubborn doubting of worth; an inability to stand with conviction behind anything without wondering if they should be standing there at all; a sense that if they move in this direction, it’s wrong; and if they move in that direction, that’s wrong, too.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Night of Miracles

“It seems like you always are the way you are right now, unless you are a movie star, when people always see you the way you were best.”
― Elizabeth Berg, True to Form

“I will come back as a little breeze,” she says. “You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I’m still listening. So you can still talk to me.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“Sometimes Suralee and I walked up to the cemetery and lay on the graves. We liked to pretend we were letting dead people speak through us. “I was a hardworking man with a talent for whittling,” Suralee might say from her”
― Elizabeth Berg, We Are All Welcome Here

“The dishes we ate from were not translucent china but, rather, the heavy white plates common in less expensive cafés. Still, the food served on them was prepared by my mother, and I believed then, as I do now, that it makes a difference in taste when one’s thoughts and feelings and hands are employed in what one serves.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand

“presence”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv

“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, Once Upon a Time, There Was You

“petechiae”
― Elizabeth Berg, Once Upon a Time, There Was You

“He taught her one of her favorite words: hiraeth, a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv

“Life was curiously exhausting but also exhilarating.”
― Elizabeth Berg, We Are All Welcome Here