Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

We live but a short time, at the longest. How do we make our lives mean something? If we die in glory, with our minds and our hearts fixed on achieving a great goal, we have lived a life that mattered.

Well, I've said it often enough to others: there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you'll stay in a place you've outgrown.

Make time for prayer and reflection; try to understand your value as a man on earth but see, too, your proper place in the scheme of things. It may sound funny to say this, but I have come to see that we are all far more important and less important than we think.

We're so far away from those stars

A family is no place for privacy!

People are stupid. Why are they so stupid? There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed: love and be loved. Follow it and you're happy. Fight against it and you're not. It's so simple, it's hard to understand.

I'll love you forever in darkness and sun, I'll love you past when my whole sweet life is done.

No one could ever be for me what [he] had been because he had known me when, and that had kept me away from the true reality of my years.

The one to tell. The one to be told by. For him, that was marriage.

You know, sometimes marriage is iron. Sometimes it's tissue paper. And I think the times it's tissue paper are when you need to keep things to yourself. Or you can end up making a mistake that you'll regret forever.

As for mending, I think its good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. Its an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You'll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there's an art to mending. If you're careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the think because it is a testimony to its worth.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would sound like if everybody stopped their complaining. It sure would be a quiet place.

If you see a sunset and try to describe it to someone in normal words, all you can say is, 'Boy, I saw a great sunset last night.' But if you are a poet, you give it to someone to feel for themselves. Like you make a little seed of what you saw, they swallow it, and it blooms again inside their own hearts.

Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.

Oh. maybe little kids are trouble, sometimes, but only for a good reason: They are tired. They are hungry. They are afraid. He supposes a great many ills of adults might be cured by a nap or a good meal or a bit of timely reassurance. But adults complicate everything. They are by nature complicators. They learned to make things harder than they need to be and they learned to talk way too much.

I understand that he is made up of working cells, just like me--crowded and confused pieces of genius that have been tampered with and now, wounded, go along in the way that they are able.

She honestly wondered sometimes which fate was worse, death or standing behind a curtain and looking out at the street at all the things you felt you could no longer have.

He tells her that, when Nola first died, he thought he'd die himself, of the sorrow. He says he'd read that grief has a catabolic effect and he thought for sure it would take him right out, this immense and gnawing pain, that it would eat him alive from the inside out. But it didn't. It took a long time for him to shift things around so that he could still love and honor Nola but also love and honor life, but it happened. And it will happen to her.

It's amazing how smart the body is. Though maybe we could do without loving. I think it's overrated, and I think it's too hard. You should only love your children; that is necessary, because otherwise you might kill them. But to love a man? It's overrated, and it's too hard and I will never, ever do it again.

Frank, saying, Who cares what happens before we're born and after we die? The question is, what do we do in the meantime?

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.

I wish I could leave a trail of gratefulness behind me that you could see, glowing thanks. I would pay to see stars, but I never have to. This to me is one of those miracles.

It seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true visions when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.

I've never regretted doing anything in my life as much as I've regretted not doing it. There were a few times when in my heart I knew the right thing to do, but I listened to other people, or I didn't have the guts, or it didn't make sense, or I don't know.… There was some false voice inside posing as logic when it was really just my own fear talking. The times I didn't stay true, didn't stay congruent, I paid the price.