Top 40 Lucia Berlin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love houses, all the things they tell me, so that’s one reason. I don’t mind working as a cleaning woman. It’s just like reading a book.”

— Lucia Berlin

2. “Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.”

— Lucia Berlin

3. “I pity you. All your life you are going to be paralyzed by What Is Done, by what people tell you you should think or do... The best thing that could happen to you would be for you to be uncomfortable once in a while.”

— Lucia Berlin

4. “It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I’ll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it’s more likely I’ll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty... It’s not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.”

— Lucia Berlin

5. “Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept.”

— Lucia Berlin

6. “I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don’t actually ever lie.”

— Lucia Berlin

7. “The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.”

— Lucia Berlin

8. “The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.”

— Lucia Berlin

9. “Her smile, though, no, it was her laugh, a dusky, deep cascading laughter that caught the joy, implied and mocked the sorrow in every joy.”

— Lucia Berlin

10. “I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.”

— Lucia Berlin

11. “The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse.”

— Lucia Berlin

12. “But much more often I have seen the marriage and the family grow closer, better. Everybody learns to deal, has to help, has to be honest and say it sucks. Everybody has to laugh, everybody has to feel grateful when whatever else the child can’t do he can kiss the hand that brushes his hair.”

— Lucia Berlin

13. “Often they wore their hair in pin curls and a turban, getting their hair ready for – what? This still is an American custom. You see women everywhere in pink hair rollers. It’s some sort of philosophical or fashion statement. Maybe there will be something better, later.”

— Lucia Berlin

14. “Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.”

— Lucia Berlin

15. “Whenever Ter read a book, rarely – he would rip each page off and throw it away. I would come home, to where the windows were always open or broken and the whole room would be swirling with pages, like Safeway lot pigeons.”

— Lucia Berlin

16. “I like my job in emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God – because it’ll be hours before X-Ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.”

— Lucia Berlin

17. “I’ll bet the Catholic Church lost out on a lot of would-be nuns when they started dressing like ordinary meter maids.”

— Lucia Berlin

18. “I don’t think I ever really liked the world until I met him.”

— Lucia Berlin

19. “Everywhere risk and defiance weave through the most mundane daily affairs.”

— Lucia Berlin

20. “One thing I do know about death. The “better” the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person’s death makes.”

— Lucia Berlin

21. “There was panic in my eyes. I looked into my own eyes and back down at my hands. Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands.”

— Lucia Berlin

22. “Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.”

— Lucia Berlin

23. “The moon. There’s no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow.”

— Lucia Berlin

24. “The first mystery was that the rows of candles under each of the statues of Jesus and Mary and Joseph were all flickering and trembling as if there were gusts of wind when in fact the vast church was shut tight and none of the heavy doors were open. I believed that the spirit of God in the statues was so strong it made the candles flutter and hiss, tremulous with suffering. Each tiny burst of light lit up the caked blood on Jesus’s bony white feet and it looked wet.”

— Lucia Berlin

25. “But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn’t feel?”

— Lucia Berlin

26. “I’ve never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It’s hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.”

— Lucia Berlin

27. “Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.”

— Lucia Berlin

28. “I’ve never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It’s hard.”

— Lucia Berlin

29. “My tears were for my own loneliness, my own blindness.”

— Lucia Berlin

30. “What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window? How wondrous to watch ourselves. Joggers would job even harder, blood pumping away. Lovers would love more. God damn! Look at that old semen go! Diets would improve – kiwi fruit and strawberries, borscht with sour cream.”

— Lucia Berlin

31. “God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame.”

— Lucia Berlin

32. “Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five.”

— Lucia Berlin

33. “Women’s voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning women or cats.”

— Lucia Berlin

34. “She wiped the mirror so she could look at herself. Mediocre and grim, she thought. Not mediocre, her face, with wide gray eyes, fine nose and smile, but it was grim. A good body, but so long disregarded it seemed grim too.”

— Lucia Berlin

35. “Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.”

— Lucia Berlin

36. “She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or an advertisement.”

— Lucia Berlin

37. “When your parents are dead your own death faces you.”

— Lucia Berlin

38. “Most American women are very uncomfortable about having servants. They don’t know what to do while you are there.”

— Lucia Berlin

39. “The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me.”

— Lucia Berlin

40. “Death is healing, it tells us to forgive, it reminds us that we don’t want to die alone.”

— Lucia Berlin

41. “My sons have all grown now, so I’m down from five washers to one, but one takes just as long.”

— Lucia Berlin

42. “Anytime you think you hate somebody, what you do is pray for them. Try it, you’ll see.”

— Lucia Berlin

43. “I get mad at everyone because they are working, living. Sometimes I hate you because you’re not dying. Isn’t that awful?”

— Lucia Berlin

44. “Only Americans smile all the time.”

— Lucia Berlin