Quotes from Elizabeth Berg

I miss you," he says. "I still miss you, sweetheart. Every day is like the first day I lost you.

I will be so glad for you to hear not the sounds of gunfire but the sounds of church bells, and of people working in peace.

There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.

I like to do things in bed. I fold the laundry on the bed. Food tastes better to me when I'm under the covers. Bed is the only place to read, the best place to talk on the phone.

The person with the bleeding finger doesn't hurt less for the person next to him with the bleeding arm.

Martha Raye slipped up to the colonel and she said, 'Sir, where do we eat?' He said, 'You mess with the men.' 'I know that,' she said, 'but where do we eat?

I decided in high school that I wasn't going to get married too soon. I'd forgotten that you can also wait too long, and then the only candies left in the box are the squished ones, rejected for their questionable insides. And if I'm honest, I'd have to count myself among those with questionable insides.

The owner was this very thin woman who looked sort of bitchy, which, think about it, most very thin women do-even when they smile, it's like grimacing. Fat people are often miserable too, but at least they LOOK jolly even though it's really mostly them apologizing, like, Sorry, sorry, sorry I'm offending your idea of bodily aesthetics, Sorry I'm clogging my arteries and giving the thumbs-up to diabetes.

My mother lost too much and repaired herself in the only way she was able to repair herself. That in fact she is repairing herself, hour by hour.

Sometimes it seems like a little moment brings a whole world with it.

I am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding.

There I was, waiting, afraid I'd never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.

Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can't control them coming in. But you don't have to let them all out.

I wasn't sure it was right to abandon myself to lighthearted banter, to allow someone to interfere with my being able to behave in whatever way I chose, whenever I wanted. What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn't weaned from that yet; I wasn't finished being with him in the only way I had left.

We forget how ready people are to help. You can talk all you want about the evil spirit of man. But I don't think it's true. I think most of us are just dying to be good. And one way we can do that is to forgive the bad in others as well as in ourselves. I don't say don't hold people accountable. Help them be accountable. But to say those words to yourself or another? 'I forgive you'? Most powerful words in the world.

wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

I don't think it's foolish. I don't think love is ever foolish.

It seemed impossible that men with hearts and brains were capable of it. Such devastation of cities, so many innocent lives lost. It seemed to him that if just a small part of the effort put into war could be put into peace, they'd be so much better off

Do you guys ever think about how Hitler has affected the whole world? That just one man did all this? I mean, what if he had been a good man, instead?

For all that we might be, if only we'd let ourselves.

Funny how an animal can hurt your feelings when you're all alone.

There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.

She is her odd self. The kiln has been fired. She is a person persnickity 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.

I think people see death as the hunter, but it's just the ticket taker, the timekeeper. It's the sound of a record playing in the background.