Quotes from Elizabeth Smart

Qué va a ocurrir ahora? Nada. Pues todo ha ocurrido ya. El tiempo entero es ahora, y el tiempo no puede ofrecer nada mejor. Nada puede ser más ahora que ahora, y antes de ahora nada era. No hay hechos menores en la vida, sólo existe un hecho, éste, único y colosal.

How can she walk through the streets, so vulnerable, so unknowing, and not have people and dogs and perpetual calamity following her? But overhung with her vines of faith, she is protected from their gaze like the pools in Epping Forest. I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injury only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.

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.

God, come down out of the eucalyptus tree outside my window, and tell me who will drown in so much blood.

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?

Find a miracle, hold onto it, and keep going.

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.

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.

For who plans suicide sitting in the sun?

Nature, perpetual whore, distracts with the immediate.

To deny love, and deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest to heavenly love, is repulsive, as the hypocrite's face is repulsive when placed too near the truth.

What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only one tremendous one.

Remember I am not temptation to you, but everything is which inclines you away. Nor are you to me, but my entire goal.

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

La mantequilla sube diez centavos. El ser humano baja.

To be asked to relive this horribly painful part of our lives and then be questioned on whether we could have or should have done more than we did to help ourselves is, frankly put, insulting. The truth of the matter is, the person being questioned survived. So that in and of itself is a big deal.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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