Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

Eighteen. The word is a poem.

He taught her one of her favorite words: hiraeth, a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places.

Do not carry remorse for anything in the past; in the end, it is only prideful. Let peace dwell inside you, live your life in joy, and give thanks that God has come to you in this way.

I wanted to keep it as small as possible, so that it would go away sooner. I needed to keep it to myself.

She walks away, and Arthur stares at the headstone. "Isn't that something?" he asks Nola. "We have a family.

Getting lost is the only way to find what you didn't know you were looking for.

It seemed there was a leak in my life.

But if a husband needed to be away from his wife in order to live his life more fully, the wife experienced a loneliness made worse by humiliation.

Change the question, you know?

If there's one thing Lucille hates, it's how science has to rain on whimsy's parade:

When did After start? I don't remember it starting. I only remember it having arrived. Things were bad for such a long time before he left. But I miss him. I can feel loneliness in my like circulation; as constant and as irrefutable.

You couldn't keep up with life. It was like fabric running through a sewing machine, everything slipping through your fingers and moving away from you.

We are meant to use what we have, whatever it is. We are meant to be less mindful of our insides, more outwardly directed.

But she is not those people; she is her odd self. The kiln has been fired; she is a person persnickety about keeping her house clean but not above spitting on her desk to rub out a coffee stain; she will never be an athlete or a mathematician or a skinny person or someone whose heart isn't snagged by the sight of fireflies on a summer night and the lilting cadence of a few good lines of poetry.

Marriage is a funny thing. It only really makes sense to the ones who are in it together, and not even always then.

Die and you'll be popular.

all of our lives, we long to know what our future will be. It is a mercy we do not know.

It's not always a good idea, digging around in the past," he said. "I done that once. I went to see the girl who got away. And I remembered real soon why I let her get away.

philosophy? It's this: Our job, regardless of our bodily circumstances, is to rise above what holds us down, and to help others do the same!

For ten years before I began writing for a living, I worked as a registered nurse. Never mind that the work was hard—more than once, I literally had not time for even a bathroom break. (My husband never believed me about this, but it was true.) Never mind that I had to work on holidays and every other weekend and on people's birthdays, my own included; I loved the job.

welcome antidote to the speed of modern life. By their very nature, letters allow for more consideration of the words and thoughts that someone is offering you, in part because they prevent interruption.

I made him ricotta pancakes with pecan syrup for breakfast. And he ate them, knowing he'd be dumping me right afterward. What kind of person does that?

Sometimes Suralee and I walked up to the cemetery and lay on the graves. We liked to pretend we were letting dead people speak through us. "I was a hardworking man with a talent for whittling," Suralee might say from her

That's the Jesus truth. It's a wide, wide world. Sooner you lift up your gaze from your own self, sooner you know that.