Top 50 Elizabeth Smart Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not what happens to us that defines us. It’s what we choose to do with what happens to us that defines us.”

— Elizabeth Smart

2. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

4. “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

5. “Knowing it can always get worse, I try to be grateful for whatever good I have.”

— Elizabeth Smart

6. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

8. “Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.”

— Elizabeth Smart

9. “I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.”

— Elizabeth Smart

10. “You will always have value and nothing can change that.”

— Elizabeth Smart

11. “But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.”

— Elizabeth Smart

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

— Elizabeth Smart

13. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

15. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

17. “I am possessed by love and have no options.”

— Elizabeth Smart

18. “O I know they make war because they want peace; they hate so that they may live; and they destroy the present to make the world safe for the future. When have they not done and said they did it for that?”

— Elizabeth Smart

19. “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

20. “I am alive, but I’m not living, I remember thinking as I walked. I am the living dead. I am nothing but a shell.”

— Elizabeth Smart

21. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

23. “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?”

— Elizabeth Smart

24. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

29. “I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.”

— Elizabeth Smart

30. “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

31. “It’s because I’m only interested in the big things that I’m not interested in politics.”

— Elizabeth Smart

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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.”

— Elizabeth Smart

35. “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

36. “You have to be slightly blind to believe in any cause.”

— Elizabeth Smart

37. “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

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

— Elizabeth Smart

39. “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

40. “Later, there were times when I was angry with myself for succumbing to that fear. But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.”

— Elizabeth Smart

41. “I didn’t have the cable around my ankle, and I was grateful for that, but that wasn’t enough to make me happy. I was still welded to Mitchell. I was anything but free. His words were stronger to me than any chains or cable ever could be.”

— Elizabeth Smart

42. “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.”

— Elizabeth Smart

43. “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

44. “I have learned an important lesson. Yes, God can make some good come from evil. But even He, in all His majesty, won’t make the evil go away. Men are free. He won’t control them. There is wickedness in this world.”

— Elizabeth Smart

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Elizabeth Smart

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

— Elizabeth Smart

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

— Elizabeth Smart

50. “He begins by repeating a wise saying that’s been attributed in various forms to everyone from Confucius to Oprah: Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past.”

— Elizabeth Smart