Elizabeth Berg
You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.Collection: Inspirational
She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that 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.Collection: Beautiful
There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.Collection: Happiness
The 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.Collection: Hands
Sometimes you know before you know.Collection: Sometimes
I will come back as a little breeze. You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I am still listening. So you can still talk to me.Collection: Life
People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I mean?Collection: Hurt
I 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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Sound
Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.Collection: Real
There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.Collection: Long Distance Relationship
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.Collection: Self
Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.Collection: Borrowing
But it seemed to me that this was the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and the salvation.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Opportunity
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.Collection: Writing
Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.Collection: Loss
You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are...off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart.Collection: Heart
I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.Collection: Sleep
For all it's problems and difficulties, life is mostly a wonderful experience, and it is up to each person to make the most of each day. I hope you are successful in your life, but look to the heavens and the earth and especially to other people to find your real wealth. Wherever I am, wherever you go, know that my love goes with you.Collection: Real
There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if many of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens.Collection: Thinking
I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.Collection: Might
It's amazing how smart the body is. Though maybe we could do without loving. I think it's overrated, and I think it's too hard. You should only love your children; that is necessary, because otherwise you might kill them. But to love a man? It's overrated, and it's too hard and I will never, ever do it again.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Men
I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.Collection: Opportunity
Outside, the rain sometimes comes down so hard, we have to talk louder, and it feels like a miracle that the roof holds. It makes for a coziness and a gratefulness, too, that you have the choice to not be out in it. You can sit at the table and look out the window and not have to feel what you see.Collection: Rain
Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.Collection: Heart
The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Strong
It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.Collection: Men
My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.Collection: Heart
It is never about how good your voice is; it is only about feeling the urge to sing, and then having the courage to do it with the voice you are given.Collection: Voice
Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren't all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don't look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.Collection: Believe
As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.Collection: Character
But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.Collection: Strong
There is incredible value in being of service to others.Collection: Incredibles
Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.Collection: Serendipity
Make time for prayer and reflection; try to understand your value as a man on earth but see, too, your proper place in the scheme of things. It may sound funny to say this, but I have come to see that we are all far more important and less important than we think.Collection: Prayer
I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.Collection: Moving
There are some things you never say good-bye toCollection: Bye
If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.Collection: Inspirational
Oh just wait. It takes a lot of time, that's all...You'll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you've ever had. A certain richness happens only later in life. I guess its' a kind of mellowing. p 80 talking about marriage and husbandsCollection: Appreciation
Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was youCollection: Long Ago
No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.Collection: Mother
Now, 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.Collection: Mind
I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.Collection: Beautiful
books are like confort food without the caloriesCollection: Book
There are people who have never studied writing who are capable of being writers. I know this because I am an example. I was a part-time registered nurse, a wife, and a mother when I began publishing. I'd taken no classes, had no experience, no knowledge of the publishing world, no agent, no contacts ... Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.Collection: Mother
I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I've heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.Collection: Running