Top 160 Elizabeth Berg Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Nobody knows what goes on in other families, because families lie about themselves to other people. Not only to other people but to one another. And to themselves.”

— Elizabeth Berg

102. “I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I’m not talking Santa, here, either.”

— Elizabeth Berg

103. “You know what? That woman’s pain being greater than yours doesn’t make your pain any less. She deserves the best we can offer, and so do you. Now roll over and hike up your johnnie.”

— Elizabeth Berg

104. “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!”

— Elizabeth Berg

105. “Nothing will brings lovers closer together than people trying to keep them apart.”

— Elizabeth Berg

106. “The truth is, aging can be your realest opportunity to decide how best to live – and the best incentive for getting you to do just that.”

— Elizabeth Berg

107. “Kids don’t really see old people. A lot of people don’t.”

— Elizabeth Berg

108. “I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.”

— Elizabeth Berg

109. “He hesitates, then turns and starts up her walk. Gives her a friendly smile, to boot. He wishes she wouldn’t wear a wig, or at least not one that sits so crookedly on her head. It’s a distraction. Sometimes he has to restrain himself from reaching over and giving it a little tug, then smacking her knee in a friendly way and saying, “There you go!” But why risk humiliating her?”

— Elizabeth Berg

110. “I’m sorry! It’s just that it hurts so much and it never stops!”

— Elizabeth Berg

111. “What she knows now is that no one is ever through with love. No one ever should be.”

— Elizabeth Berg

112. “When it’s new and important, you have to rest in between times. And anyway, even when I like a person there is a weariness that comes. I can be with someone and everything is fine and then all of a sudden it can wash over me like a sickness, that I need the quiet of my own self. I need to unload my head and look at what I’ve got in there so far. See it. Think what it means. I always need to come back to being alone for a while.”

— Elizabeth Berg

113. “Frank, saying, Who cares what happens before we’re born and after we die? The question is, what do we do in the meantime?”

— Elizabeth Berg

114. “As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.”

— Elizabeth Berg

115. “Sometimes, just when you think you’re going to die from pain, rage steps in to save you. There’s only so much room in a human heart. Thank God. The.”

— Elizabeth Berg

116. “I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we’re all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it’s a major design flaw. We ought to be able to say, Here, look what I am. I think it would be quite a relief.”

— Elizabeth Berg

117. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

118. “This is not a novel about a woman leaving home, but rather a human being finding her way back.”

— Elizabeth Berg

119. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

120. “Ruth has friends like other people have wardrobes. I mean that there’s someone for every occasion.”

— Elizabeth Berg

121. “We’re all trapped in a body with limitations, even the most able-bodied among us! And we’re all guided by minds with limitations of their own. You want to know my philosophy? It’s this: Our job, regardless of our bodily circumstances is to rise above what holds us down, and to help others do the same.”

— Elizabeth Berg

122. “Are these real diamonds?” I once asked, and she said, “Why have them if they’re not?”

— Elizabeth Berg

123. “I hadn’t realized how much I’d been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.”

— Elizabeth Berg

124. “I don’t think you’ve even begun to realize all there is for you to love. And I know you better than anyone, and 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?”

— Elizabeth Berg

125. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

126. “I don’t think it’s foolish. I don’t think love is ever foolish.”

— Elizabeth Berg

127. “If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.”

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

129. “Never think winter will last when spring is equally inevitable.”

— Elizabeth Berg

130. “There are some things you never say good-bye to.”

— Elizabeth Berg

131. “Souls are ageless and care nothing for external circumstances.”

— Elizabeth Berg

132. “No, love is never foolish. Or unnecessary.”

— Elizabeth Berg

133. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

134. “There’s always hope when a kid – or an adult, for that matter – likes to read.”

— Elizabeth Berg

135. “Well, anyway, her death changed our lives for the better, because it brought a kind of awareness, a specific sense of purpose and appreciation we hadn’t had before. Would I trade that in order to have her back? In a fraction of a millisecond. But I won’t ever have her back. So I have taken this, as her great gift to us. But. Do I block her out? Never. Do I think of her? Always. In some part of my brain, I think of her every single moment of every single day.”

— Elizabeth Berg

136. “It feels like some part of me that was curled down and waiting in the dark has risen, and now stands stretching and strong in the sunshine. I knew it.”

— Elizabeth Berg

137. “Sometimes you know before you know.”

— Elizabeth Berg

138. “I don’t think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.”

— Elizabeth Berg

139. “It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.”

— Elizabeth Berg

140. “But losing weight for health reasons is a very dull prospect, doomed at the outset. Losing weight for romance, that’s altogether different.”

— Elizabeth Berg

141. “Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that’s what it is, one after the other.”

— Elizabeth Berg

142. “Already I’ve seen that when you’re pulled away from your normal routine, it’s as though air and sunlight come into your brain and do a little housecleaning.”

— Elizabeth Berg

143. “What mattered was that at the end, someone who loved her sat by her, saying, I see you. I.”

— Elizabeth Berg

144. “Those who say life is a glorious blessing are right. Those who say it is endlessly cruel are also right.”

— Elizabeth Berg

145. “It will happen when you’re not looking for it. Love likes to take you by surprise.”

— Elizabeth Berg

146. “I would try to find joy despite the necessary work of grieving, and I knew full well that work was exactly the right word to describe it. It was John’s life that was over, not mine.”

— Elizabeth Berg

147. “There’s nothing like getting in trouble to make you feel young.”

— Elizabeth Berg

148. “Life has its way, and it seems to me now that the object might only be to learn how to be graceful, to understand the value of a deep kind of acceptance.”

— Elizabeth Berg

149. “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.”

— Elizabeth Berg

150. “People who don’t feel cared for are not always comfortable being cared for.”

— Elizabeth Berg