A Quote by Elizabeth Berg

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.
She just wanted to be comfortable in her own skin...But she would not stop to seek others' approval. The notion that she should never seemed to enter her head. Her right to live as she pleased was not up for negotiation, even if it ran against the grain of the milieu at Huntingdon.
She'd assumed she'd be married and have kids by this age, that she would be grooming her own daughter for this, as her friends were doing. She wanted it so much she would dream about it sometimes, and then she would wake up with the skin at her wrists and neck red from the scratchy lace of the wedding gown she'd dreamed of wearing. But she'd never felt anything for the men she'd dated, nothing beyond her own desperation. And her desire to marry wasn't strong enough, would never be strong enough, to allow her to marry a man she didn't love.
Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears, fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms… That’s how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears.
She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.
Eleanor Roosevelt never thought that she was attractive. She never thought that she was really sufficiently appealing. And I think her whole life was a response to her effort to get her mother to pay attention to her, to love her, and to love her as much as she loved her brothers.
My mother didn't feel sorry for herself, she was left with no child support, no alimony at a very young age, with a child to raise, a high school education and she just figured it out. She didn't complain, she didn't rely upon government, she relied upon her own skill set, her own self confidence, her own drive in moxie and her own duty to me and her and she relied upon her family and her faith.
Rebecca held her head high and swanned across the hallway, but as she neared the footman, she could see quite plainly that his gaze was not where it should be. She stopped dead and slapped her hands over her bosom. "Its too low, isn't it? I knew I shouldn't have listened to that maid. She might not mind her boobies hanging out for all to see, but i just can't-" Her brain suddenly caught up with her mouth. She removed her hands from her bosom and slapped them over her awful, awful, awful mouth.
I think that one morning, the Papess woke in her tower, and her blankets were so warm, and the sun was so golden, she could not bear it. I think she woke, and dressed, and washed her face in cold water, and rubbed her shaven head. I think she walked among her sisters, and for the first time saw that they were so beautiful, and she loved them. I think she woke up one morning of all her mornings, and found that her heart was as white as a silkworm, and the sun was clear as glass on her brow, and she believed then that she could live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl.
Little miss is taught by her mamma that she must never speak before she is spoken to. On this she sits bridling up her head, looking from one to the other, in hopes of being called to and addressed by the name of pretty miss.... But if this should not happen and no one should take any notice of her, she is ready to cry at the neglect. But should there be another miss in the room caressed and taken notice of whilst she is thus overlooked, it will be impossible for her to contain her tears, and blubbering is the word.
I met this girl who had a huge scar on her leg from a car accident. She was talking about how, after it first happened, she would always wear long pants and cover it up. But, as she started to grow into it, she decided that that's just her now. It's just a part of who she is. She wears skirts and she shows it off now.
Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up, Ben; she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She's a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She's a twelve-year-old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because mama had to go to Heaven. She's a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She's all the unsung heroes who couldn't make it but never quit.
My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.. It seemed so natural, to talk to him about odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.. But now she could think only of all the things she yet wanted to tell him, wanted to do with him.
My mother lived her life through movies and books - she read everything there was to read. And she read to me every night. I never went to sleep without her reading to me. And she fantasized about the book and she would talk about it, the place, and you would think that after she read the book and after she told you stories about it, that she had actually been there. I learned about story from her, and I learned the value of a great story, and the value of great characters.
As a child, Kate hat once asked her mother how she would know she was in love. Her mother had said she would know she was in love when she would be willing to give up chocolate forever to be with that person for even an hour. Kate, a dedicated and hopeless chocoholic, had decided right then that she would never fall in love. She had been sure that no male was worth such privation.
The story of my grandmother is that of a French woman from the provinces who through her perseverance and thirst for knowledge worked her way up to become the head of a school. She belonged to a generation that didn't travel much. But she believed in Europe and she wanted Europe. And she read a lot - she knew mythology, literature and the classics very well. She passed that on to me, along with the conviction that you can earn your own position in society.
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