Talk Before Sleep Quotes

“I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“I always think incipent miracles surround us, waiting only to see if our faith is strong enough. We won't have to understand it; it will just work, like a beating heart, like love. Really, no matter how frightened and discouraged I may become about the future, I look forward to it. In spite of everything I see all around me every day, I have a shaky assurance that everything will turn out fine. I don't think I'm the only one. Why else would the phrase "everything's all right" ease a deep and troubled place in so many of us? We just don't know, we never know so much, yet we have such faith. We hold our hands over our hurts and lean forward, full of yearning and forgiveness. It is how we keep on, this kind of hope.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“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, Talk Before Sleep

“One thing I have always been is too short. It's adorable when you're in junior high. After that, it's a pain in the ass for the rest of your life.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“You must never check for a person's pulse using your thumb, or you'll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I'm the one who's here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“I hate banana bread. It's too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“How is it that we dare to honk at others in traffic, when we know nothing about where they have just come from or what they are on their way to?”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“...and there is such honesty and innocence to her voice I want to hold her. The bedside lamplight is a rich golden color, and it is falling on her face in a way that makes it seem gilded. For a moment, L.D. looks to me like an angel. Another case of illusion only being the larger truth.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“Japanese tea ceremony; a way of honoring oneself by putting another's needs first, the joy that could be found in intimate service...A conversation we'd had one night on the way home from a movie. I remember that night he'd put toothpaste on my brush before his own, then bowed, I smiled, but I'd understood too that such small gifts were one seed that blossomed in two hearts.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“Everybody always forgets that you die the way you live. She will keep on being herself until the end.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“I will come back as a little breeze,” she says. “You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I’m still listening. So you can still talk to me.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“when you are aware you are dying, the path narrows, and there is room eventually for only one person—you, not distracted by anything else and therefore able to see all that couldn’t be seen before. And that this can be such a great gift that you shiver inside at the taking of it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“If we look at the path, we do not
see the sky. We are earth people
on a spiritual journey to the stars.
Our quest, our earth walk, is to look
within, to know who we are, to see that
we are connected to all things,
that there is no separation,
only in the mind. —Native American,”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“Women do not leave situations like this: we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, "What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it." I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I've heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep