Top 160 Elizabeth Berg Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “I thought of the priest who’d told me that many religions hold that it is easier to be closely connected to people we love after death than before.”

— Elizabeth Berg

54. “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

55. “Everybody makes mistakes, sometimes even before we get up in the morning. We can’t help but make mistakes. The important thing is to keep trying. And to apologize when you need to.”

— Elizabeth Berg

56. “This is the thing about strong people: you can mostly be scared of them but sometimes the way they are makes you feel safe.”

— Elizabeth Berg

57. “He tells her that, when Nola first died, he thought he’d die himself, of the sorrow.”

— Elizabeth Berg

58. “It seems like people are all the time making themselves themselves, but they don’t really know it. You can only have true vision 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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

59. “When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.”

— Elizabeth Berg

60. “I remove my wedding rings and put them in the jewelry box. So many others have done this. I am not the only one. I am not the only one. But here, I am the only one.”

— Elizabeth Berg

61. “We are assumed to be rather hopeless – swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.”

— Elizabeth Berg

62. “I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.”

— Elizabeth Berg

63. “That summer rain I mean that is so quiet and matter of fact and falls straight down like a curtain. Now.”

— Elizabeth Berg

64. “Oh, Arthur, no one even sees you when you get old except for people who knew you when you were young.”

— Elizabeth Berg

65. “There are certain things in your life that will become every important to you. You might not be able to explain to anyone else why they’re important. But you will expect the people who love you, the people who are your family, to respect those things.”

— Elizabeth Berg

66. “I’ll love you forever in darkness and sun, I’ll love you past when my whole sweet life is done.”

— Elizabeth Berg

67. “Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.”

— Elizabeth Berg

68. “You must never check for a person’s pulse using your thumb, or you’ll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I’m the one who’s here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.”

— Elizabeth Berg

69. “Actors, painters, dancers, comedians, even just ordinary people doing ordinary things, what are they without an audience of some sort? 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, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don’t mind it, Lucille. I don’t feel useless. I feel lucky.”

— Elizabeth Berg

70. “For what reason would I lie to one I so love?”

— Elizabeth Berg

71. “What does anyone say to anybody who used to be so important in her life, whom she’s not seen in such a long time? It seems to me that in situations like this, we’re all wondering the same thing: I’m still me; are you still you? A.”

— Elizabeth Berg

72. “I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.”

— Elizabeth Berg

73. “I understood, that he was right in asking to be cremated. For if he was nowhere, he could be everywhere. As in, with me.”

— Elizabeth Berg

74. “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?”

— Elizabeth Berg

75. “She doesn’t exactly know why kids don’t like her. She’s good-looking enough. She has a sense of humor. She’s not dumb. She guesses it’s because they can sense how much she needs them. They are like kids in a circle holding sticks, picking on the weak thing. It is in people, to be entertained by cruelty.”

— Elizabeth Berg

76. “Books educate and inspire, and they soothe souls – like comfort food without the calories.”

— Elizabeth Berg

77. “I think the kind of love that comes after romantic love is the best, richest love of all. At some point, I think we all want someone we can look ugly around, reveal our vulnerabilities to, and, most important, trust. And as a former nurse, I found that when people are at their most vulnerable, at their “ugliest,” is when they’re the most beautiful. In this novel, I think true love is saying, “I see you wholly and I love you anyway.”

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

79. “Isn’t it really true that life is so beautiful because it’s so fleeting and fragile?”

— Elizabeth Berg

80. “You know before you know, of course. You are bending over the dryer, pulling out the still-warm sheets, and the knowledge walks up your backbone. You stare at the man you love and you are staring at nothing; he is gone before he is gone.”

— Elizabeth Berg

81. “Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.”

— Elizabeth Berg

82. “Life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.”

— Elizabeth Berg

83. “You feel the call. That’s the important thing. Now answer it as fully as you can. Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.”

— Elizabeth Berg

84. “As a writer, you should have a sticky soul; the act of continually taking things in should be as much a part of you as your hair color.”

— Elizabeth Berg

85. “Funny how an animal can hurt your feelings when you’re all alone.”

— Elizabeth Berg

86. “One thing about doing this kind of work, you develop a keen appreciation for the fact that you can walk. And see the sky. And feel the air on your face. And that you can check high and low and no, nothing in your body is hurting, not one thing. I.”

— Elizabeth Berg

87. “It’s good for you to be a bit uncomfortable from time to time, especially if you’re only a few steps away from relief. People forget about the value of adversity.”

— Elizabeth Berg

88. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

89. “How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything.”

— Elizabeth Berg

90. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

91. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

92. “She goes back to bed, turns out the light, and can hear herself start to snore before she falls off into sleep. She doesn’t know why so many people hate snoring. She finds it soothing. White noise, with a ruffle.”

— Elizabeth Berg

93. “This is the way things work sometimes, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now let’s go ahead and let her have it all.”

— Elizabeth Berg

94. “Arthur thinks that, above all, aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.”

— Elizabeth Berg

95. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

97. “I used to make a basket of my hands to hold a feeling of joy that came upon me, then flatten my hands against my chest as if to make it part of me. Not understanding that it already was.”

— Elizabeth Berg

98. “How is it that we dare to honk at others in traffic, when we know nothing about where they have just come from or what they are on their way to?”

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

100. “I could still taste and smell and hear and see,” she said. “I could still learn and I could still teach. I could still love and be loved. I had my mind and my spirit. And I had you.”

— Elizabeth Berg