Elizabeth Berg
You don't get everything all at once. You wait.Collection: Waiting
My inside self and my outside self used to match. A compass needle pointed true north. Now the needle spins around and around indicating the sad direction of nowhere.Collection: Self
I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Mean
I thought of the priest who'd told me that many religions hold that it is easier to be closely connected to people we love after death than before.Collection: People
In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.Collection: Summer
I like to listen to sad music when I’m sad. It seems honest. It makes me cry, and sometimes a good cry is the only thing that can make you feel better.Collection: Feel Better
The heart of myself has always been something just wanting so bad. I have had an empty center, black as a basement, but also knowing about light and waiting. Young as I am, I know now that everything is about to come. Jimmy will be the place for me to learn the real happiness. He will be my Joy School. My joy. Mine.Collection: Happiness
Sometimes I try to remember things my mother told me about the awful way he was raised. But why does he have to keep on going? Why would you take something bad out of your mouth and hand it to another, saying, Here, eat this?Collection: Mother
As a writer, you should have a sticky soul; the act of continually taking things in should be as much a part of you as your hair color.Collection: Writing
*We give so little when it's in us always to give so much more. It's bothering to listen with an open heart to someone who smells bad. It's hard.Collection: Heart
One thing I have always been is too short. It's adorable when you're in junior high. After that, it's a pain in the ass for the rest of your life.Collection: Pain
Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.Collection: Dream
Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.Collection: Fall
Well, most women are full to the brim, that's all...We are, most of us, ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with "Mommy" embroidered over the left breast, over the heart...If a stranger had come up to me and said, "Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen," I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it.Collection: Children
Ruth has friends like other people have wardrobes. I mean that there's someone for every occasion.Collection: Friends
I remember once when we were moving, driving across country, and it was raining so hard, the windshield wipers going fast and squeaking, and then: nothing. It stopped. I looked out the window ahead of me and it was clear. I looked out the back and there was the rain, still going. Nobody said anything, but there it was, a near miracle, a rain line, a way of seeing just where something starts, when usually you are just in the middle of it before you notice it. That's how it feels to me now, to not want to be like (that) anymore. I see the line.Collection: Country
I hate banana bread. It's too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Problem
...in my head, a person who was out walking and walking in the dark comes to a little house with a light on. Waits at the door for a moment, and then goes in finds such a welcome that she stays.Collection: Dark
It will happen when you're not looking for it. Love likes to take you by surprise.Collection: Likes
I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?Collection: Children
I remove my wedding rings and put them in the jewelry box. So many others have done this. I am not the only one. I am not the only one. But here, I am the only one.Collection: Here I Am
He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the good place, and a heart-shaped leaf lay trapped in the hollow if his throat as though it were planned, though of course it was so perfect it couldn't have been planned.Collection: Heart
This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.Collection: Girl
You must never check for a person's pulse using your thumb, or you'll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I'm the one who's here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.Collection: Giving
We 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.Collection: Origin Of Life
I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Appreciation
How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything.Collection: Forget Everything
Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you.Collection: Romance