Elizabeth Berg Quotes

Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.

I moved around 13 different times before I was in fifth grade, not having money, not having a lot of friends.

For many years, I didn't have a home.

Living with the notion that you might never have a permanent spot in the world is really quite a powerful metaphor.

I moved schools seven or eight times, but I never thought of it as a problem. I didn't become attached to people.

It was difficult when I was very young because I was so separated from my family. When I was at school or acting in a play, I felt very much part of something, and then it would always change, and I would be by myself.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

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.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

Man hath still either toys or care: But hath no root, nor to one place is tied, but ever restless and irregular, about this earth doth run and ride. He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where; He says it is so far, that he has quite forgot how to go there.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, 'Don't get comfortable, because we may not be here long.'

It was the rootlessness that went with being the son of an RAF officer that shaped me. I had been to 11 schools by the time I was 9.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

Every day, it's a different country, different time zone. If you asked me where home was, I've never felt like I've had that. My idea of comfort is to leave a place. Two weeks is sort of my max.

As someone who works and travels as much, you could feel... A bit rootless?

There was no time when I lived anywhere longer than two years. I was always a social outcast. Maybe I didn't care what people thought because I was like, 'Well, I probably won't stick around here for too long.'

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

I don't even know how it is to have a home. I feel like an orphan or something.

I've never felt at home anywhere.

I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.

I am a Maharashtrian but was not brought up in Maharashtra, as my father worked in CPWD and was transferred every two years. So I have always been a gypsy. I, therefore, could not make good friends, and it still takes me a long time to form attachments.

The actual thought of not really having a home was, for me, very depressing, and it was something that I was dealing with for quite some time.

I've very aware of my rootlessness.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.