Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

No. Real love isn't like that. My dad says real love is when the other person is your best friend and you shouldn't have to work hard around them, it should be, like, more natural, and you just want to be with them even if you're not doing anything.

Here is another thing I like about a good friendship, the go-aheadness of it all. You don't have to knock to come in the door. You don't have to ask to look in a refrigerator. You want coffee? Pour some. These friendships, formed by time, are getting so rare. I worry about that. "How

Goodness and mercy may not follow me all the days of my life, but it is here now.

I learned a lot about medicine in those years, but I learned more about human nature. I learned about bravery and resilience, about the many forms of grief, and especially about the importance of the little things in one's life. I've said many times that nursing taught me the value of the "little" things that individuate and define our lives—the things that ultimately make it worth living.

The greatest understanding of a thing is when you can't reduce it any further.

All these small things are the glue that keeps you bound to your own life. They are the things that make you you. And in that respect, they are not little at all. They are huge. They are grand.

You have so much love to give! But I feel like you're all the time digging in the tomato bin, saying, 'Where are the apples?' 

There's so much she can't wait for.

Now it is a war of days: on

It's like you let your mind stay in its pajamas

I throw sticks for him, and it comes to me that it is a miracle I am able to do this: use my arm, full strength. Follow the course of the stick clearly. Walk without fatigue or pain. Assume, with blind confidence, that I will be able to do this tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Spend an afternoon with someone who has been told their number is up, and you will will regard everything you do later that day with grateful wonder. I mean, even laundry.

Mason's Make-It-Happen Realtor!")

feels that everything that just happened between them is a pretty illusion, a ride on a carousel. Here is his world: Sadie.

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.

I felt my aloneness like a coat. You think you get used to death in the dying. But after the dying is done, you see how the end is the beginning.

redemptive beauty, I think. Despite her

I never saw the point in going out to fancy restaurants. It's not that I don't appreciate good food; I love good food. But why go to all this trouble? Why put on fancy clothes to eat? I

I am crippled in love relationships by fear, by defense, by doubt, by my own lack of self-regard. It makes me constantly want to abandon ship.

I wanted him to be a toy man that I could bring upstairs with me, then store on a high shelf in the closet. But he was alive and complicated. He came with his own parts that had their own demands.

Always be kind and comport yourself well, my child, for that will be your only happiness in life." "You mean that I will otherwise be unhappy?" "Yes," she said, "everyone has times of sorrow, but you will have more than most. And also you will have much to forgive." "But why?" "Because it will happen that you will have to forgive the only source of happiness you will know.

Everybody always forgets that you die the way you live. She will keep on being herself until the end.

yearning and grief for lost places.

You know that hormones will course through you, whispering commands; that the pull of the moon will be shared by you and the ocean and the minds of wild things.

He's Nola's blossoms, and he's ready.