Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

Oh just wait. It takes a lot of time, that's all...You'll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you've ever had. A certain richness happens only later in life. I guess its' a kind of mellowing. p 80 talking about marriage and husbands

I think it's a real gift to be able to say that what's in your life is enough. It seems most of us re always wanting more.

Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness.

For what reason would I lie to one I so love?

aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels. Marsha thinks about this. Then she says, Not true. I know, Tom says, and sighs.

I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to ´´hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.´´ I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.´´

She understood the specific kind of appreciation that comes to a person witnessing a thing of beauty alone, how the spectacle seems to sit whole inside the soul, undiminished by conversation, by any attempt at translation or persuasion.

If a summer were a girl, she'd always be lying stretched out in the grass in a long white dress, her arms over her head, her eyes half closed.

Here is the knowledge, so easy and mean: find what they love and wreck it. Simple.

Did she ever think of that, that things experienced in ways different from hers were equally valuable? That the way that he chose to love her was, in fact, loving her, that the face of love depended on the person giving it?

Who doesn't long for one more time of seeing someone they've loved and lost? And yet what would you say, what would you do, if it were possible?

I just don't know anymore. God! I'm in a bad mood! It's like walking around in an itchy coat.

Come over here and light me a cigarette, she'd said. I'd snuck a little inhale, and my mother had smiled. But then she'd said, Don't get started with something you won't be able to do without.

Books educate and inspire, and they soothe souls -- like comfort food without the calories.

See, that's what I do. I am the audience. I am the witness. I am the great appreciator, that's what I do and that's all I want to do. I worked for a lot of years. I did a lot of things for a lot of years. Now, well, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don't mind it, Lucille. I don't feel useless. I feel lucky.

Willow trees dipped their bare branches into pond water like girls testing the temperature with their toes.

I tell you, I will never understand the mystery of love. A woman comes to a man because she wants only him; then she cannot bear the sound of air moving in and out of his nostrils. She cannot bear the sight of his shadow upon the pavement!

You don't do so well with marriage. I don't think you've begun to realize all there is for you to love. And I know you better than anyone & here's what I know about you: 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?

Once you start making decisions in which your heart, mind, and soul are congruent, you'll feel it as a kind of lift, if not liftoff.

And she finally told Nola that she was so worried about whether she could love two children, about whether she could make room in her heart for as much love as she felt for Bobby. Wasn't it betraying Bobby, to love another child? And Nola told her what her sister Patricia had said, after having her second. Patricia said she felt like she'd grown a second heart.

The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths.

there's always a hope, you never know.

Human beings. They are the ones with the most important job. They are supposed to make what they want out of what they are given.