Elizabeth Berg

“If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I’d ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, “It’s all right,” I said, quickly. “It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later.”

“I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.”

“As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom.”

“No matter what you write, you need an active imagination.”

“Really, my sacred place is my study where there are books that I love and things that people have given me.”

“For all it's problems and difficulties, life is mostly a wonderful experience, and it is up to each person to make the most of each day. I hope you are successful in your life, but look to the heavens and the earth and especially to other people to find your real wealth. Wherever I am, wherever you go, know that my love goes with you.”

“As we continue to become a society of tweets, shorter and shorter messages, there's great value in the contemplation and reflection that comes from reading a long body of work.”

“Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it.”

“When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.”

“When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.”

“When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry.”

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

“You need a place to work that works for you, and you need people to understand that when you are writing, you are doing a rarefied type of brain surgery and therefore should not be subject to a million random interruptions.”

“Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.”

“For me as a writer, it's so joyful to know that someone hears and responds to what I write.”

“Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work.”

“Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that.”

“My mom used to keep all her Christmas cards in a basket bedecked with red ribbon, and I loved to look at them all and read all the letters.”

“I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.”

“It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.”