Elizabeth Berg Quotes

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.

Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.

Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.

I don't hold Travis anymore, of course- not to read to him, or for any other reason, either. I wish I'd known that the last time was going to be the last time.

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.

Are these real diamonds?" I once asked, and she said, "Why have them if they're not?

Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you

You don't get everything all at once. You wait.

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?

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.

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.

You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.

The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open hand.

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