Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

Love begins as a rhapsody and ends as a dirge.

But you know what usually happens when you take a vacation to a place that galvanizes you and makes you feel like you're going to change your life. You come home and get right back into your old habits. Meanwhile, a slow fire burns. A

Outside, it snowed; fat, lazy flakes, drifting with soft intention toward the place they were meant to land.

have never done this except with old-fashioned adults. It feels like we're in a new club. Gwen is wearing a brown

The mind has a way of protecting the heart, of turning one's gaze in a certain direction, away from what it should focus on. One

Because my mother is a third base.

The beginning is always so hard. Any beginning is always so hard.

Biscuit rage, I call it," Gretchen says. "It's that sudden rising up of irrational and completely outsize anger you can experience when you least expect it. You know what I mean: someone takes that last biscuit that you were just going to take, and you just want to bite their ear off. It's like road rage, only domestic.

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.

You know your parents are going to die, but they are going to die later. They are going to die sometime. But that time will not come until you no longer need them. While you still need them, or might need them, they will have the good taste and

no one is ever through with love. No one ever should be.

She is like a sparkler you cannot stop watching and want to touch so badly.

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

YOU COULD LIVE ONE day in your life over again and change the outcome of something that happened that day, what day would it be? This is a question many people have difficulty answering. Not Iris Winters. She knows the day, and she knows exactly how she'd change what happened.

big love, it's like a powerful blanket, laid down on your land, warming you and protecting you. Something like that. I get out my poetry notebook. History can wait. Today two kids fell asleep in Mr. Spurlock's class and he didn't even notice until one started snoring.

I go up to my room, close the door and sit on my bed, my hands clasped in my lap, and in my chest is a raggedy sadness. Outside, the sun hangs at the horizon, then drops. Day is done. (page 60)

you think that your pushing me so hard for something you wanted made me kind of necessarily resist it? Would you admit that, would you say that you pushed way too hard?

Our own individual life history is also shaped that way. In large part, when you factor out fate, what we are is because of what we believe about ourselves. Wherever we are in the world, we mostly live in the small space between our ears.

I don't know. It depends on the day. Depends on the hour of the day...I don't really know if I really want to do that. I think I do and then I think I don't. It makes me really nervous to think about really doing it.

A human being writes the book, but what writes for him or her is more spirit than physical being, and that spirit lives only in solitude.

too. So you see that all my big mistake did was to make for a better party because that's how mistakes are, they make for a kind of relaxation, at least on the part of those not making them.

one of the hardest things in life is fessing up to what you want most, because if you do that, and you don't get it, it's so hard to be without it.

I don't think Martha's so bad. I think I want her for a friend instead of you. When I look at her magazine, I feel soothed. When I talk to you, I feel like hanging myself.

You live your life, and you get to ask for things, and sometimes they are given to you.