Quotes from 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.

I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold on to. I dare not be without a cigarette in my hand. If I should be looking the other way when the hour of doom is struck, how shall I avoid being turned into stone unless I can remember something to do which will lead me back to the simplicity and safety of daily living?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 the one tremendous one.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I will feel like a success if I raise my children to be kind and happy people.

If I get to the end of my life, if I die, and I find out religion is one big lie, I still won't regret it because it's helped me to live a better life, to be a better person, to care about people, to believe in forgiveness, to believe in hope.

Religion has been a huge part of my life.

I was broken beyond repair.

I am possessed by love and have no options.

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.

It is wrong for any person to ever judge someone in any situation saying, 'Well, why didn't you try to run? Why didn't you scream? Why didn't you try to do something?' That is so wrong and, frankly, offensive to even ask that question.