Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Elizabeth Berg - Page 2

I'm nuts about the South - the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there - but it's hard to know whether I'll use it as a location again.

As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.

Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.

I have not been in a book club where there were any men, and I have not, in fact, heard of book groups that were mixed.

I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.

Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.

Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you're just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love.

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.

I think it's harder - much harder - to be a good parent than to write a book.

I like my house to feel like a place where I can just lie back and say, 'Ahhhhh, I'm home.'

I think writers are born, not made.

The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky!

I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.

I never meant to write about the experience of losing a good friend to breast cancer when I was going through it. But after it was over, I realized that although something deeply sad had happened, something truly beautiful also had.

I've been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you're not an American.

Elvis is symbolic of a lot of things, dreams coming true being one of them.

For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write.

You should not pay too much attention to what anyone tells you, including me. It's very, very important to follow your own map.

My mother and her five sisters have always been living examples of the great love that can exist among sisters - and in a large family.

No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way.

I hope to show the great worth of women. So far as I'm concerned, we're still underappreciated.

Ultimately, the less I know about what I'm doing, the better the work is.

When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work.

I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else.

No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests.

People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously.

As we continue to become a society of tweets, shorter and shorter messages, there's great value in the contemplation and reflection that comes from reading a long body of work.

People see 'tradition' as something stultifying, old, and rigid, nothing that has meaning or application for us today. But families shouldn't have to follow the blueprint of the old. They can make family traditions out of whatever makes them feel comfortable and helps bring a sense of order and stability to their lives.

I remember, as a child, wanting all the time to buy my parents presents. I stood around forlornly in fancy shops, unable to afford a single thing.

The world of literature is so rich and so enriching. The value is inestimable of what reading does for you.

I got married at twenty-five and had children right away, so I didn't have the worry that I would never get to have children.

In this wide world, I don't think that there's just one person for any of us. I think we look until we find one that feels right, and oftentimes, it works out just fine.

It is one thing to see your friend dance around a table when she's 25, quite another thing to see her doing it when she's 62.

Never try to copy other writers, and never try to have a formula. It has to come from your heart and soul.

Nurses don't get paid very much. It didn't take long to realize that I could make more as a writer. I loved nursing, but I loved writing more.

My characters are like my children in a way. I create them, and then I worry about them forevermore.

Traditions are the inventions of people who mean to routinely put love and comfort and meaning into their lives and in the lives of those they live with.

Not being as self-contained as men, we need to share things: It's almost as though you only know what you feel about things after you share them with a woman.

There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

Sometimes you know before you know.

People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I mean?

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.

You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.

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.

Don't let your habits become handcuffs

Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.