Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I don't recognize my former self. Like I'm on the outside looking in at my life. Who is that guy?

So being two different people in one day unnerved me to no end.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

I think I've always had a disconnect from what I'm supposed to be like.

My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.

Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true - that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.

When people are struggling, that's a painful place to be in, to not know who you are and where you belong and what you desire.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong.

I don't feel like a 40-year-old. I feel more like four 10-year-olds, each pulling in a different direction.

There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.

I've always operated so far outside my lane, I'm not sure what lane is mine anymore.

I have absolutely no sense of my success whatsoever, in fact, I only have a sense of not doing what I intended to do. I don't know who I am.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I have never met a man who has given me as much trouble as myself.

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

I hate you." I love you." You're a freak, you know that? Everyone says so. They always have." I'm trying not to be.

The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.

Since I’ve known you, you’ve been spinning and spinning and spinning into all these various personas, and none of this self-exploration and experimentation has given you a sense of peace. I’ve known you for six years, intimately for four, and I still have no idea who I’m in love with.

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

Everyone thinks I'm crazy, you know, because I can't tell them the truth; which is, that I'm driven crazy by all these thoughts, all these heads.