313 Quotes by Elizabeth Berg

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.

Actors, painters, dancers, comedians, even just ordinary people doing ordinary things, what are they without an audience of some sort? See, that’s what I do. I am the audience. I am the witness, I am the great appreciator that’s what I do and that’s all I want to do. I worked for a lot of years. I did a lot of things for a lot of years. Now, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don’t mind it, Lucille. I don’t feel useless. I feel lucky.

Some things come true. They might come true in ways different than we might have predicted, but some things do come true.

Don’t let your habits become handcuffs.

Japanese tea ceremony; a way of honoring oneself by putting another’s needs first, the joy that could be found in intimate service... A conversation we’d had one night on the way home from a movie. I remember that night he’d put toothpaste on my brush before his own, then bowed, I smiled, but I’d understood too that such small gifts were one seed that blossomed in two hearts.

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.

Arthur thinks that, above all, aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.

You know what? That woman’s pain being greater than yours doesn’t make your pain any less. She deserves the best we can offer, and so do you. Now roll over and hike up your johnnie.

Souls are ageless and care nothing for external circumstances.