Elizabeth Berg Quotes

As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.

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.

I don't hold Travis anymore, of course- not to read to him, or for any other reason, either. I wish I'd known that the last time was going to be the last time.

There I was, waiting, afraid I’d never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.

How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way?

...wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

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.

I will be so glad for you to hear not the sounds of gunfire but the sounds of church bells, and of people working in peace.

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

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.

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.

Are these real diamonds?" I once asked, and she said, "Why have them if they're not?

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