Elizabeth Berg

“It is a happy day when I am asked to publicly recommend a book. It is also a dilemma. When I consider all the books I have loved and depended upon and profited from, how can I pick just one?”

“Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times.”

“I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.”

“I love to listen to people talk, especially when they're being really honest and they're not trying to sound any particular way.”

“We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.”

“When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent.”

“If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost.”

“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.”

“You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.”

“There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.”

“In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.”

“Everybody knows the mother-daughter relationship is one of the most complex there is.”

“I also think you should take care of yourself. You can crack up a little when these things go on for so long. You've got to bring a healthy self in here. That will help him most. He needs to feel your strength. And you need to do what you have to keep it.”

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

“As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.”

“I can't decide if I'm a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer's wife, a crazy person.”

“I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.”

“I think titles are extremely important for novels: They can set the tone, tip you off, serve as shorthand for what the essential contents are.”

“I don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write.”

“When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work.”