Best 35 quotes of Elizabeth Smart on MyQuotes

All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was.

Always that tyrannical love reaches out. Soft words shrivel me like quicklime. She will not allow me to be cold, hungry. She will insist that I take her own coat, her own food.

April 19 And now it is spring. Birds are singing. Wistful notes and jubilant. And bare streets and no need for coats, and skipping ropes and bicycles and a thin new moon.

But the human spirit is resilient. God made us so. He gave us the ability to forgive. To leave our past behind. To look forward instead of back.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard, learn to live, and by her busy ways, reform thy own.

How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.

I feel helpless, hopeless, too low to call out, too weak to think. Impotent tears dribble down.

If I had my wilderness, nature could be my lover. What can I do in the paved streets for my thirsty roots? I waste time. I encourage fools. I slip the vital hours into penny slot machines -- to pass time, to start my stuck wheels only love can oil.

I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.

I like to think that we’re not defined by what happens to us…because so many times they’re beyond our control. I like to think that we’re defined by our choices and our decisions.

I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me.

I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning.It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone.Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.

Knowing it can always get worse, I try to be grateful for whatever good I have.

Life is a journey for us all. We all face trials. We all have ups and downs. All of us are human. But we are also the masters of our fate. We are the ones who decide how we are going to react to life.

Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.

O I know they make war because they want peace; they hate so that they may live; and they destroy the present to make the world safe for the future. When have they not done and said they did it for that?

Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day. The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up. The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power. The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different. The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees. In the end they all died.

Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

Vanity is a vital aid to nature: completely and absolutely necessary to life. It is one of nature's ways to bind you to the earth.

We can choose to allow our experiences to hold us back, and to not allow us to become great or achieve greatness in this life. Or we can allow our experiences to push us forward, to make us grateful for every day we have and to be all the more thankful for those who are around us.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

What you forget is that plants themselves want to live as much as you want them to. More.

Work is the only only only remedy for life: for happiness, for interest, for stability, for security. Hard, willed work. Oh work!

Yesterday from my office window I saw a crippled girl negotiating her way across the street, her shoulders squarely braced. At each jerky movement her hair flew back like an annunciatory angel, and I saw she was the only dancer on the street.

You have to have short fingernails or they'd just break off, and you can't wear red polish - it looks like your fingers are bleeding.

As of this writing, I am twenty-five years old. I have been alive for 307 months. Nine of those months were pretty terrible. But 298 of those months have been very good. I have been happy. I have been very blessed. Who knows how many more months I have to live? But even if I died tomorrow, nine out of 307 seems like pretty good odds.

Elizabeth, what this man has done is terrible. There aren't any words that are strong enough to describe how wicked and evil he is! He has taken nine months of your life that you will never get back again. But the best punishment you could ever give him is to be happy. To move forward with your life. To do exactly what you want. Because, yes, this will probably go to trial and some kind of sentencing will be given to him and that wicked woman. But even if that's true, you may never feel like justice has been served or that true restitution has been made... You be happy, Elizabeth. Just be happy. If you go and feel sorry for yourself, or if you dwell on what has happened, if you hold on to your pain, that is allowing him to steal more of your life away. So don't you do that! Don't you let him! There is no way that he deserves that. Not one more second of your life. You keep every second for yourself. You keep them and be happy...

I didn't understand most of what he was saying. I should have had to understand what he was saying. I was still so young. And I certainly should not have had to learn it this way!

If my mission and my religion have taught me anything, its that faith isn’t just what you believe in; its how you live, how you love, and how you move forward. My faith- and this religion thats been the vehicle for my faith- has played a huge role in my life. Its always been there for me when I needed something to hold on to. At the end of the day, if all religions prove to be wrong, I won’t regret believing, because it has made me a better person and has helped me live my life in such a way that I will never need to be ashamed of any part of it. A set of beliefs that help provide hope, healing, and a meaningful way of life. It really is something quite beautiful and extraordinary.

It is enough, the now, and though it comes without anything, it gives me everything. With it I can repopulate the world. I can bring forth new worlds in underground shelters while the bombs are dropping above; I can do it in lifeboats as the ship goes down; I can do it in prisons without the guard's permission; and O, when I do it quietly in the lobby while the conference is going on, a lot of states-men will emerge twirling their moustaches, and see the birth blood, and know they have been foiled. Love is strong as death.

Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.

Our bodies are to be celebrated, despite our individual limitations.

(Summarized) Forgiveness is a choice that presents itself to us in the form of three critical questions: 1) Can I give up the hope of a better past? 2) What is the day, the hour, the now - when I fulfill the promise to myself to let it go? 3) How will I integrate what's happened into who I choose to become in the future?