Top 160 Elizabeth Berg Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

105. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

122. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

125. “That’s life. You’re born, and you get a ride on the Whirligig.”

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

128. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

134. “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

135. “Sometimes you know before you know.”

— Elizabeth Berg

136. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

144. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

146. “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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

150. “I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?”

— Elizabeth Berg