The heart of myself has always been something just wanting so bad. I have had an empty center, black as a basement, but also knowing about light and waiting. Young as I am, I know now that everything is about to come. Jimmy will be the place for me to learn the real happiness. He will be my Joy School. My joy. Mine.

Elizabeth Berg

Don't let your habits become handcuffs

Elizabeth Berg

handcuffs habit

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

Elizabeth Berg

return family inspirational

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.

Elizabeth Berg

quilts laughter happiness

She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.

Elizabeth Berg

beautiful past thinking

People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I mean?

Elizabeth Berg

hurt mean people

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.

Elizabeth Berg

gratitude dark beautiful

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

Elizabeth Berg

funny-diet taste loss

The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open hand.

Elizabeth Berg

kind trying hands

You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are...off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart.

Elizabeth Berg

moments heart littles

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.

Elizabeth Berg

miracle choices rain

I will come back as a little breeze. You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I am still listening. So you can still talk to me.

Elizabeth Berg

listening littles life

The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.

Elizabeth Berg

black-and-white children past

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.

Elizabeth Berg

incentives aging opportunity

There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if many of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens.

Elizabeth Berg

office people thinking

I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.

Elizabeth Berg

this-life realizing opportunity

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.

Elizabeth Berg

serendipity intention sometimes

It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.

Elizabeth Berg

cry men

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.

Elizabeth Berg

ready lines moving

There are some things you never say good-bye to

Elizabeth Berg

good-bye saying-good-bye bye

If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

Elizabeth Berg

gym-class teenager inspirational