Best 24 quotes of Liz Murray on MyQuotes

Anything that is within someone else's reach is also within yours. Set your goals no matter how impossible they may seem. Then focus on what is between you and that goal. And then, simply take out the obstacles as they come.

As well as being blind, Ma turned out to have the same mental illness that her mother had had. Between 1986 and 1990, she suffered six schizophrenic bouts, each requiring her to be institutionalised for up to three months.

But avoidance allows you to believe that you're making all kinds of strides when you're not.

I'd been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends' houses, sometimes in the subway.

If I had a magic wand, I would live in a building in New York, big enough so my friends, my family could all have apartments in it. We'd raise our kids in the same space and have backyard barbecues and get old and fat together.

... In our family, if you said the words 'I feel,' they better be followed with 'hungry' or 'cold'. Because we didn't get personal, that's just how it was.

In the years ahead of me, I learned that the world is actually filled with people ready to tell you how likely something is, and what it means to be realistic. But what I have also learned is that no one, no one truly knows what is possible until they go and do it.

Life has a way of doing that; one minute everything makes sense, the next, things change. People get sick. Families break apart, your friends could close the door on you.

Like my mother, I was always saying, 'I'll fix my life one day.' It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.

Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is.

Ma was legally blind due to a degenerative eye disease she'd had since birth. This meant she was entitled to welfare, and our lives revolved around the first day of every month when her payment was due.

My mother used to sit at the foot of my bed and she would share her dreams with me.

One point of view gives a one dimensional world.

Shortly after I turned 13, Child Welfare took me into care. I was sent to a residential centre where girls with behavioural problems were 'evaluated'. My time there comes back to me now only in flashes of smells, images and sounds.

There's always a way through things if you work hard enough and look close. It all depends on your level of determination.

This fork in the road happens over a hundred times a day, and it's the choices that you make that will determine the shape of your life.

When you go back to your environment and you deal with employees... do you inspire people or do you make them feel fear? Do you make them feel confident or incompetent? I think that distinction really marks the leader.

But I know I didn't love school for school's sake. I had never really been what people call an 'academic' person, nor did I see myself becoming one. Instead, I took pleasure in the fact that my work existed in a social setting, one that was based on the promise of a brighter future. I knew that what I adored about school was that each of my assignments - readings, essays, or in-class presentations - was inseparable from my relationships [...] If I loved school at all, I loved it for what it provided me access to: bonds with people I grew to cherish. And nothing was better than working toward my dreams alongside people I loved who were doing the same.

It's not that we didn't love one another- we did. I just think we didn't know how to be with one another anymore. No one had prepared us for this, for what to do when tragedy breaks up your family. We had no idea what to do when disease took hold, mental illness struck, when Ma died. And we weren't prepared for what happens when proximity no longer brings you together, and instead connecting became a matter of making an effort toward one another. We were doing the best we cold with what we had.

No he hadn't been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he'd disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.

Since as far back as I could remember, I'd felt that Lisa's responses toward me usually bordered on the brink of hostility. Years later, a therapist would explain that growing up with few resources had turned us into competitors- over food, over our parents' love, over everything. At the moment, we were competing for who had the better handle on Ma's illness, and we both knew she was winning.

The more needy I kept myself, the more it would always be up to other people what happened to me, I decided I would make my life so full of things that empowered me, people like this woman would shrink away, until they disappeared from my sight.

We would be in each other's lives again. No, he hadn't been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he'd disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.

Your potential in this world is timeless