313 Quotes by Elizabeth Berg

Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.

Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that’s what it is, one after the other.

I wasn’t sure it was right to abandon myself to lighthearted banter, to allow someone to interfere with my being able to behave in whatever way I chose, whenever I wanted. What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn’t weaned from that yet; I wasn’t finished being with him in the only way I had left.

Outside, the rain sometimes comes down so hard, we have to talk louder, and it feels like a miracle that the roof holds. It makes for a coziness and a gratefulness, too, that you have the choice to not be out in it. You can sit at the table and look out the window and not have to feel what you see.

For what reason would I lie to one I so love?

People who don’t feel cared for are not always comfortable being cared for.

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.

I tell you, I will never understand the mystery of love. A woman comes to a man because she wants only him; then she cannot bear the sound of air moving in and out of his nostrils. She cannot bear the sight of his shadow upon the pavement!

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.