Quotes from Elizabeth Smart

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

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.

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.

That was very comforting to me to hold onto that belief, that I did have a heavenly Father who was watching over me.

I will never regret being there for my children, watching them, making sure they'll be okay. But I might regret not being there for them.

I see myself as a survivor, and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a survivor. To me, survivor implies strength, implies that I have been through something and I made it out the other side.

When I look in the mirror, I also see a mother and a wife and someone I am proud to be. I see an advocate. I see a survivor.

Usually, my husband is a pretty good rock, a pretty good sounding board... He definitely brings a center of gravity into my life.

My children have brought so much happiness and joy. To me, they're the very definition of love.

My parents have raised me to believe in a kind and a loving God and someone who cares about me, who is always there for me, and who would never wish harm or illness or any kind of tragedy upon me.

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.

I'm grateful for rain because, when I was kidnapped, that meant that I had something to drink.

When we are faced with a challenge, it is very easy to be mad or upset. But 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 would not be able to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

he has martyred me, but for no cause

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

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.

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.

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

your attitude is not your mood.

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.