Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

history is shaped by the belief systems of those who made it.

I 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.

There were no formulas to account for the idiosyncratic yearnings of a human heart, no ways to extract from someone feelings that lived as matter-of-factly as blood and bones inside of him. In the end, Griffin thought, we are only who we are.

I would like to step into the body of a woman whose insides don't feel as though they have been spending time against the fine side of a cheese grater.

You know I love you, but you are one of the most exasperating people I have ever met.

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.

Women do not leave situations like this: we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it. 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.

you once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.

Earth's the right place for love.

Arthur thinks that, above all, aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance

Nothing will bring lovers closer together than people trying to keep them apart

What's the point in loving anything when it will just change or be taken away?" I asked. And she said, "The point in loving is only that. And when you lose something, you have to remember that then there is room for the next thing. And there is always a next thing, Cece. I wish you would believe me.

love came in without knocking and stayed without your permission. And when hard times came between you and the one you loved, you didn't run away.

Love purifies everything

Negro ideas. But they were just ideas, free-floating and of no color at all.

women of a certain age who still want to fight the good fight, as Gretchen sees it. She has

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.

It was simply the unalterable truth: unfortunate but upon us; and so it had to be borne.

They say that one of the reasons for tragedy is that you learn important lessons from it.

Sometimes serendipity is just intention, unmasked.

If there's one thing Lucille hates, it's how science has to rain on whimsy's parade: Rainbows not a gift from leprechauns offering pots of gold, but only a trick of refraction. A blue sky not a miles-wide painting done by a heavenly hand, but molecules scattering light. Still, when Lucille sees the stars strewn across the sky on a night like tonight, they're diamonds, and she thinks they might end up under her bed yet. Maybe

there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you'll stay in a place you've outgrown. When

Every mother has the assurance that her baby will love her. But a baby has no assurance at all of being loved in return.

I step across any reflections that are too dark with great strides, and when I am in my right mind, I find life acceptable because it is eternal. You call that my dreaming. I call it my faith and my strength. No, nothing dies, nothing is lost, nothing ends, whatever you may say. —George Sand, in a letter to Delacroix