03UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
04UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
05UndatedI made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
06UndatedThe 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 / quote ↗
07UndatedLife 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 / quote ↗
08UndatedThis is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
09UndatedIf 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 / quote ↗
10UndatedThe best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type--it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
11UndatedThe 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 / quote ↗
12UndatedI am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
13Undated...wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
15UndatedHey. Know what happened to me today?"He sits back and crosses his arms, smiles. "No. What happened to you today?""Well, I decided to take the bus to work instead of driving? And I got on and I sat behind this woman who started crying. She was very quiet about it, just every now and then she would reach up and wipe away a tear. She had this kerchief on her head, this ratty old flowered kerchief, but it was clean and it was tied very neatly, you know. And she had her purse on her lap and she was holding on to it like it was hands. At first nobody else seemed to notice she was crying, but then everybody around her did. And it got very quiet. And then finally this man got up from the back of the bus, and he came up and sat next to her and put his arm around her, and he didn't say a word, but just stared straight ahead with his arm around her and she kept crying, but it was better now, you could tell, she kind of had a little smile even though she was still crying. And I don't know if he even knew her! I think everybody was wondering the same thing: Does he even know her? I guess he must have known her; otherwise she probably would have leaped up and started screaming or something, but you never know! You just never know, it might have been someone whose heart went out to her because she was crying. And he decided he would comfort her. And she let him. And I think it was a kind of miracle. A living parable or something.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
16UndatedThis 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 / quote ↗
17UndatedWhen you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
18UndatedNow, 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 / quote ↗
19UndatedI think it's a real gift to be able to say that what's in your life is enough. It seems most of us re always wanting more.Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
20UndatedWe 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 / quote ↗
21UndatedAre these real diamonds?" I once asked, and she said, "Why have them if they're not?Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
23UndatedIt seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true visions 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 / quote ↗
24UndatedI would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?Elizabeth Berg / quote ↗
