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

The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type--it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God.

— Elizabeth Berg

The light is amber, the air still; the day lilies have folded in on themselves. Soon, the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky-writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing in 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 nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.

— Elizabeth Berg

There are some things you never say goodbye to

— Elizabeth Berg

There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Elizabeth Berg

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

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