Top 160 Elizabeth Berg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is incredible value in being of service to others.”

— Elizabeth Berg

2. “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”

— Elizabeth Berg

3. “You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.”

— Elizabeth Berg

4. “There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.”

— Elizabeth Berg

5. “I like to listen to sad music when I’m sad. It seems honest. It makes me cry, and sometimes a good cry is the only thing that can make you feel better.”

— Elizabeth Berg

6. “Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.”

— Elizabeth Berg

7. “Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you.”

— Elizabeth Berg

Featured in: Romance Quotes

8. “Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don’t agree.”

— Elizabeth Berg

9. “Patience is not only a virtue; it is a form of grace.”

— Elizabeth Berg

10. “My inside self and my outside self used to match. A compass needle pointed true north. Now the needle spins around and around indicating the sad direction of nowhere.”

— Elizabeth Berg

11. “Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.”

— Elizabeth Berg

12. “People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I mean?”

— Elizabeth Berg

13. “Don’t let your habits become handcuffs.”

— Elizabeth Berg

14. “What is it that makes a family? Certainly no document does, no legal pronouncement or accident of birth. No, real families come from choices we make about who we want to be bound to, and the ties to such families live in our hearts.”

— Elizabeth Berg

15. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

16. “What Maddy has come to believe is that certain life circumstances make for people who walk with a psychic limp for all of their days. Never mind the progress they seem to make, peel back a few delicate layers and there it is: a stubborn doubting of worth; an inability to stand with conviction behind anything without wondering if they should be standing there at all; a sense that if they move in this direction, it’s wrong; and if they move in that direction, that’s wrong, too.”

— Elizabeth Berg

17. “Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.”

— Elizabeth Berg

18. “I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.”

— Elizabeth Berg

19. “It is never about how good your voice is; it is only about feeling the urge to sing, and then having the courage to do it with the voice you are given.”

— Elizabeth Berg

20. “Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.”

— Elizabeth Berg

21. “Books don’t take time away from us,” she said. “They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed’s sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance – and the relief! – of real, tick-tock time.”

— Elizabeth Berg

22. “Oh, what I want to do is hand my life over to someone else. That’s all. And they could rearrange everything into something that would make sense.”

— Elizabeth Berg

23. “There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if many of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens.”

— Elizabeth Berg

24. “I will come back as a little breeze. You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I am still listening. So you can still talk to me.”

— Elizabeth Berg

25. “No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.”

— Elizabeth Berg

26. “Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren’t all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don’t look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.”

— Elizabeth Berg

27. “The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon, the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.”

— Elizabeth Berg

28. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

29. “Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.”

— Elizabeth Berg

30. “Isn’t life funny. It could drive you crazy if you thought about it too much. Turn this way and that happens. Turn that way and this happens.”

— Elizabeth Berg

31. “But finally my own version of God came to me in a dream, complete with a name: Corambe. He was a warm and compassionate being with a tender and unwavering regard for me. He had the humanity of Jesus and the radiant beauty of the angel Gabriel. He was graceful and poetic and ever attentive to my feelings. And though he was a male, he nonetheless dressed oftentimes in women’s clothes.”

— Elizabeth Berg

32. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

33. “Japanese tea ceremony; a way of honoring oneself by putting another’s needs first, the joy that could be found in intimate service... A conversation we’d had one night on the way home from a movie. I remember that night he’d put toothpaste on my brush before his own, then bowed, I smiled, but I’d understood too that such small gifts were one seed that blossomed in two hearts.”

— Elizabeth Berg

34. “This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.”

— Elizabeth Berg

35. “Healing hurts, but hurting heals.”

— Elizabeth Berg

36. “I should have said “powder room.” That would evoke the image of me sitting before a beautiful gold mirror, a vase of fresh flowers nearby, freshening my makeup, rather than sitting on a toilet.”

— Elizabeth Berg

37. “I hate banana bread. It’s too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.”

— Elizabeth Berg

38. “Outside, the rain sometimes comes down so hard, we have to talk louder, and it feels like a miracle that the roof holds. It makes for a coziness and a gratefulness, too, that you have the choice to not be out in it. You can sit at the table and look out the window and not have to feel what you see.”

— Elizabeth Berg

39. “When my submission has been claimed, no longer in the name of love and friendship but by reason of some right or power, I have drawn upon the strength that is buried in my nature, I have straightened my shoulders and thrown off the yoke. I alone know the latent force hidden within me. I alone know how much I grieve and suffer and love. – George Sand.”

— Elizabeth Berg

40. “But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I’ve always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.”

— Elizabeth Berg

41. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

42. “The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open hand.”

— Elizabeth Berg

43. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

44. “My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.”

— Elizabeth Berg

45. “One thing I have always been is too short. It’s adorable when you’re in junior high. After that, it’s a pain in the ass for the rest of your life.”

— Elizabeth Berg

46. “It is early morning; outside, the sky is dark and the trees move dramatically in the wind. Soon a storm will come. I want to live to see it. This is the way of nature: to persuade us around one more bend, to beckon us to behold one more vista.”

— Elizabeth Berg

47. “Sometimes I try to remember things my mother told me about the awful way he was raised. But why does he have to keep on going? Why would you take something bad out of your mouth and hand it to another, saying, Here, eat this?”

— Elizabeth Berg

48. “I do not believe the loss of a child is something one ever overcomes. One puts on the faces one needs, but inside, one bleeds and bleeds.”

— Elizabeth Berg

49. “He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the good place, and a heart-shaped leaf lay trapped in the hollow if his throat as though it were planned, though of course it was so perfect it couldn’t have been planned.”

— Elizabeth Berg

50. “I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.”

— Elizabeth Berg