Quotes from Elizabeth Smart

Even when I get on airplanes, very often, as I walk down the aisle, I notice a lot of people staring or whispering. I recognize the fact that yes, to a lot of people, I will always be that 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and who was held captive.

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.

That happened to me, but I'm so much more than that girl that was kidnapped.

This life is a test, and we're put down here to make choices. The truth is, the bad choices of other people can hurt us.

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

The #MeToo campaign is monumental. It is giving a voice to so many too scared to speak out before.

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

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.

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

I can say I have forgiven my captors. That being said, I never want to see them again. I'm not OK with they did to me.

I think forgiveness is probably one of the greatest forms of self-love there is because you don't do forgiveness for anybody else. My captors will never care if I forgive them…It will not make a day of difference to them at all, but it will make a huge difference to me.

Privacy is so sacred, and any time a victim is returned, a survivor is found and rescued, privacy is one of the greatest gifts we can give them because if they decide to share, that's up to them, and they will come forward.

I've got great dogs. I've got a great family. I mean, I couldn't be happier.

I don't feel famous personally, and I feel like when most people get to know me, they're like, 'Oh, she's just the same as everybody else.'

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.