Elizabeth Smart Quotes & Sayings

A pen is a furious weapon. But it needs a rage of will. — Elizabeth Smart

Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. And if she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no-one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness.
All people seem criminally irrelevant. I ignore everyone and everything, and, if crossed or interrupted in my decay, hate. Nature is only the irking weather and flowers crude reminders of stale states of being. — Elizabeth Smart

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires. — Elizabeth Smart

For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? — Elizabeth Smart

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! — Elizabeth Smart

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

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

Day deceives, but at night no one is safe from hallucinations. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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

The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind. All martyrdoms are in vain. He also is drowning in the blood of too much sacrifice.
Lay aside the weapons, love, for all battles are lost. — Elizabeth Smart

he has martyred me, but for no cause — Elizabeth Smart

Only remember: I am not the ease, but the end.
I am not to blind you, but to find you.
What you think is the sirens singing to lure you to your doom is only the voice of the inevitable, welcoming you after so long a wait. I was made only for you. — Elizabeth Smart

The temperament of a dandelion or cosmic preservation. Where does wonder begin? — Elizabeth Smart

Yes, I have lived through many miracles. I had experienced tender mercies that literally kept me alive. I had been carried by the love of others, and in many ways I had been blessed. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

So the price of careless rapture is a twisted history chronicled by envy.
You were too busy being. And you are too busy now. You couldn't spare the time to note down a few facts: how the sun and silence poured into the big room with the yellow curtains; how everything was never-ending and expendable. — Elizabeth Smart

I also believe in faith. Faith in a loving and kind heavenly Father who will always care about me. Faith that my worth will never be diminished. Faith that God knows how I feel and that I can depend on him to help me through it all. I believe that God not only suffered for me, but that He will make everything up to me in His own time and His own way. That gives me the peace I need to feel like justice will win out in the end — Elizabeth Smart

O where does he stalk like a horse in pastures very far afield? I cannot hear him, and silence writes more terrible things than he can ever deny. Is there a suspicion the battle is lost?
Certainly he killed me fourteen nights in succession. To rise again from such slaughter Messiah must indeed become a woman. He said this absence was the mere mechanics of the thing. But It is not the same. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

No, my advocates, my angels with sadist eyes, this is the beginning of my life, or the end. So I lean affirmation across the cafe table, and surrender my fifty years away with an easy smile. But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said. — Elizabeth Smart

Swearing invulnerably, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there. — Elizabeth Smart

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

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. — Elizabeth Smart

He is mad.
I am mad too, with an inward curtain-like madness. A pall.
There is no illumination. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood — Elizabeth Smart

When faced with pain and evil, we have to make a choice.
We can choose to be taken by the evil.
Or we can try to embrace the good. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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

Man is, without doubt, the defacer, the destroyer. But spending at least the last three years in trying to understand the enemy has almost seduced me to his side. — Elizabeth Smart

Well get a furious weapon.
Look how the springs are whirling round and you with your hat askew, without time to catch your breath and decide that THIS is the hour. Lying like an immobile amoeba, gigantic, out of season, and idiotically waiting for instigation. You know this can't be. Leave the washing up and take a look around. — Elizabeth Smart

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 Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

It's because I'm only interested in the big things that I'm not interested in politics. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

I have ceased to care about anything. I have no personal ambition, or even the desire that people call me nice, or pretty, or witty. Nor do I have any use for sensation, nor do I care. Cessation. It is a technical circle, encircling, cycle, of giving the body to be burned, but having no charity.
... What can I do? For without love I am truly dead. — Elizabeth Smart

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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

And I, who have the world in my pocket, can bring them nothing to comfort their disappointment or reward their optimism, but supplicate the fatted calf which they killed so often before and so in vain. Parents' imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged. — Elizabeth Smart

When we have passed our great test, we are then given opportunities to reach out to other people. We are able to effect change in a way that otherwise we wouldn't have been able to. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

You have to be slightly blind to believe in any cause. — Elizabeth Smart

I am possessed by love and have no options. — Elizabeth Smart

I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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

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. God will take care of the rest. — Elizabeth Smart

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

So there are to be no obsequies. There is to be no mention of that which was to have conquered the world, and after the world, death. Not one of all these martyrs nailed to every tree in the western hemisphere will find favour in the editor's measuring eye. On the amusement page, to fill up space, one inch and a half, perhaps, of those who were forced to die. Butter is up ten cents. The human being is down. — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

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 ... — Elizabeth Smart

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. — Elizabeth Smart

Do I want to, can I face my own pain alone now? Shock keeps horror at bay. Hands off. Distanced by mist and pride and drink and friends and necessities like food, babies, fires ... So the pain sits still, crouching, heavy, occupying all my inside, always, all the time, whatever my outside does. — Elizabeth Smart