Elizabeth Smart Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely.

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.