Elizabeth Berg

“Once you start making decisions in which your heart, mind, and soul are congruent, you'll feel it as a kind of lift, if not liftoff.”

“I decided in high school that I wasn't going to get married too soon. I'd forgotten that you can also wait too long, and then the only candies left in the box are the squished ones, rejected for their questionable insides. And if I'm honest, I'd have to count myself among those with questionable insides.”

“mostly, you only make a change, the balding chinese man tells me. I stare at him for a moment, uncomprehending, wondering if perhaps he is offering advice,then realize he is talking about money: I am to make change .― Elizabeth Berg, Open House”

“I think people see death as the hunter, but it's just the ticket taker, the timekeeper. It's the sound of a record playing in the background.”

“And 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.”

“If a summer were a girl, she'd always be lying stretched out in the grass in a long white dress, her arms over her head, her eyes half closed.”

“I got tears in my eyes, but they were not the crying kind, they were just the kind that show you your body agrees so much with what your mind just said.”

“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.”

“I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.”

“Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.”

“If you say something over and over again, it begins to lose it's meaning... Say anything enough times and it becomes gibberish.”

“You know, sometimes marriage is iron. Sometimes it’s tissue paper. And Ithink the times it’s tissue paper are when you need to keep things to yourself. Or you can end up making a mistake that you’ll regret forever.”

“...what John likes best are the small and undramatic moments that make for a kind of easy comfort, for a feeling of being grounded in arelationship.”

“People are stupid. Why are they so stupid? There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed: love and be loved. Follow it andyou’re happy. Fight against it and you’re not. It’s so simple, it’s hard to understand.”

“I like to listen to sad music when I’m sad. It seems honest. It makes me cry, and sometimes agood cry is the only thing that can make you feel better.”

“Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixedwith a vague sadness. A longing for a speci??c kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, ofshame. She knows it’s nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something shenever had.”

“I am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding.”

“You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their story-telling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren't good people - at least not for me.”

“It 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.”

“I 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.”

“Now there's some honest writing!”

“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.”

“Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.”

“I 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.”

“Human beings. They are the ones with the most important job. They are supposed to make what they want out of what they are given.”

“You don't get everything all at once. You wait.”

“there's always a hope, you never know.”

“It will happen when you're not looking for it. Love likes to take you by surprise.”

“I just want to say one thing. If I ever write a novel again, it's going to be in defense of weak women, inept and codependent women. I'm going to talk about all the great movies and songs and poetry that focus on such women. I'm going to toast Blanche DuBois. I'm going to celebrate women who aren't afraid to show their need and their vulnerabilities. To be honest about how hard it can be to plow your way through a life that offers no guarantees about anything. I'm going to get on my metaphorical knees and thank women who fall apart, who cry and carry on and wail and wring their hands because you know what, Midge? We all need to cry. Thank God for women who can articulate their vulnerabilities and express what probably a lot of other people want to say and feel they can't. Those peoples' stronghold against falling apart themselves is the disdain they feel for women who do it for them. Strong. I'm starting to think that's as much a party line as anything else ever handed to women for their assigned roles. When do we get respect for our differences from men? Our strength is our weakness. Our ability to feel is our humanity. You know what? I'll bet if you talk to a hundred strong women, 99 of them would say 'I'm sick of being strong. I would like to be cared for. I would like someone else to make the goddamn decisions, I'm sick of making decisions.' I know this one woman who's a beacon of strength. A single mother who can do everything - even more than you, Midge. I ran into her not long ago and we went and got a coffee and you know what she told me? She told me that when she goes out to dinner with her guy, she asks him to order everything for her. Every single thing, drink to dessert. Because she just wants to unhitch. All of us dependent, weak women have the courage to do all the time what she can only do in a restaurant.”

“The summer I was ten years old, there was a group of kids in my neighborhood who played together every night after dinner. I often watched them from my window…Every night around nine-thirty or ten, those kids would get called in one by one…I knew the first ones called were full of resentment. But they needn’t have been. Nothing ever happened after they left anyway. Things just sort of ended in a slow motion way, like petals falling off a flower. You couldn’t have people leave like that and have anything good happen afterward. Whoever was left couldn’t pay much attention to anything other than waiting for their turn to get called in. So, it wasn’t so bad to go first, to head back toward those deep yellow lights and beds made up with summer linens. It was much better than being last, when you would be left standing there alone, finally going in without anybody calling you.”

“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.”

“This 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.”

“Did she ever think of that, that things experienced in ways different from hers were equally valuable? That the way that he chose to love her was, in fact, loving her, that the face of love depended on the person giving it?”

“She is her odd self. The kiln has been fired. She is a person persnickity about keeping her house clean, but not above spitting on her desk to rub out a coffee stain. She will never be an athlete, or a mathematician, or a skinny person, or someone whose heart isn't snagged by the sight of fireflies on a summer night and the lilting cadence of a few good lines of poetry.”

“I like to do things in bed. I fold the laundry on the bed. Food tastes better to me when I'm under the covers. Bed is the only place to read, the best place to talk on the phone.”

“There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You don't do so well with marriage. I don't think you've begun to realize all there is for you to love. And I know you better than anyone & here's what I know about you: You have so much love to give! But I feel like you're all the time digging in the tomato bin, saying, "Where are the apples?”

“It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.”

“I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.”

“Willow trees dipped their bare branches into pond water like girls testing the temperature with their toes.”

“When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.”

“Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness.”

“Nona leans forward, "I had-a love."I nod."You know how it was? It was like-a trees. Oak and elm." Her voice has been soft, like it was lost in memory, but now she stares at me, her eyes narrowed, and she makes a fist and pounds the side of her chair. "The roots, they bound-a together, but the trees, they are free. You know what it's-a mean?”

“Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels."Marsha thinks about this. Then she says, "Not true.""I know," Tom says, and sighs.”

“By now I was feeling the shame but also defiance. Like here, I'm carrying the banner for all of you who cut off a little piece of cake wanting a big one, who spend a good third of your waking hours feeling bad about your desires, who infect those with whom you work and live with your judgements and pronouncements, you on the program who tally points all day long, every day, let's see, 7 for breakfast, I'm going to need only 3 or 4 for lunch, what the hell can I have for so little, oh, I know, broth and a salad with very little dressing. And broth is good! Yes! So chickeny! That's what we tell ourselves, we who cannot eat air without gaining, we who eat the asparagus longing for the potatoes au gratin, for the fettucine Alfredo, for the pecan pie. And if you're one of those who doesn't, stop right here, you are not invited to the rest of this story.”

“The owner was this very thin woman who looked sort of bitchy, which, think about it, most very thin women do-even when they smile, it's like grimacing. Fat people are often miserable too, but at least they LOOK jolly even though it's really mostly them apologizing, like, "Sorry, sorry, sorry I'm offending your idea of bodily aesthetics," "Sorry I'm clogging my arteries and giving the thumbs-up to diabetes.”

“Here is the knowledge, so easy and mean: find what they love and wreck it. Simple.”

“Every day, Helen thought, so many people tap the bull on the shoulder and say, "Excuse me. I'm just going to grab your horns.”