This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.

— Elizabeth Berg

This is the way things sometimes work, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now let’s go ahead and let her have it all.

— Elizabeth Berg

...wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

— Elizabeth Berg

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.

— Elizabeth Berg

When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. Furthermore, she talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, ticktock time.

— Elizabeth Berg

When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.

— Elizabeth Berg

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

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

— Elizabeth Berg

You don't do so well with marriage. I don't think you've begun to realize all there is for you to love. And I know you better than anyone & here's what I know about you: You have so much love to give! But I feel like you're all the time digging in the tomato bin, saying, "Where are the apples?

— Elizabeth Berg

You don't get everything all at once. You wait.

— Elizabeth Berg