Elizabeth Berg Quotes

War would end if the dead could return.

People love to be listened to and represented, and they love it when they feel like you have some of the same problems that they do. Everybody deals with things like romantic difficulties in relationships and death and cancer and abuse.

Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

I knew that my father was going to die of heart disease, and I was trying to make a heart for him.

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

I decided to quit 'Survivor: All-Stars' in order to be closer to my mother, who ended up passing away from breast cancer seven days after I returned home.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS.

I believe God weeps over - over death. Jesus wept at the grave the Lazarus. In the Bible, Jesus weeps at death.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

I had to learn compassion. Had to learn what it felt like to hate, and to forgive and to love and be loved. And to lose people close to me. Had to feel deep loneliness and sorrow. And then I could write.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

Grief releases love and it also instills a profound sense of connection.

When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as it were - with the cute busboy at the hotel.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

I don't fear death or ageing, but I fear them in other people that I am close to.

The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life.

You can think you're living in the moment and you're thankful, but when somebody comes face to face with you and says, 'I just lost my child,' or 'I have months to live, and thank you...' I'm of course sad for them, but I'm thankful that I gave them a gift and they're giving me a gift.

When you are confronted with a level of devastating disease and death, you never lose that sense of unbelievable humility.

When anyone dies, it's sad.

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.