Elizabeth Berg (author) Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

It seems like people are all the time making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true vision when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.

Elizabeth Berg
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
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
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
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
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
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
I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I've heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.

Elizabeth Berg
I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.

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
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
I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?

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
We are assumed to be rather hopeless - swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.

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

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

Elizabeth Berg
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
The heart of myself has always been something just wanting so bad. I have had an empty center, black as a basement, but also knowing about light and waiting. Young as I am, I know now that everything is about to come. Jimmy will be the place for me to learn the real happiness. He will be my Joy School. My joy. Mine.

Elizabeth Berg
The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths.

Elizabeth Berg
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
This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.

Elizabeth Berg
He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the good place, and a heart-shaped leaf lay trapped in the hollow if his throat as though it were planned, though of course it was so perfect it couldn't have been planned.

Elizabeth Berg
No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn't.

Elizabeth Berg