Top 30 Liz Murray Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s always a way through things if you work hard enough and look close. It all depends on your level of determination.”

— Liz Murray

Featured in: Recovery Quotes, Obstacles Quotes, Being Strong Quotes, Determination Quotes, Survival Quotes

2. “You are bigger than your circumstances.”

— Liz Murray

3. “This fork in the road happens over a hundred times a day, and it’s the choices that you make that will determine the shape of your life.”

— Liz Murray

4. “Life takes on the meaning that you give it.”

— Liz Murray

5. “Dream, but don’t sleep.”

— Liz Murray

6. “Anything that is within someone else’s reach is also within yours. Set your goals no matter how impossible they may seem. Then focus on what is between you and that goal. And then, simply take out the obstacles as they come.”

— Liz Murray

7. “One point of view gives a one dimensional world.”

— Liz Murray

8. “Like my mother, I was always saying, ‘I’ll fix my life one day.’ It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.”

— Liz Murray

9. “But avoidance allows you to believe that you’re making all kinds of strides when you’re not.”

— Liz Murray

10. “I was inspired by a question that kept repeating itself in my mind: Could I really change my life? I’d spent so many days, weeks, months, and years thinking about doing things with my life, and now I wanted to know, if I committed to a goal and woke up every single day working hard at it, could I change my life?”

— Liz Murray

11. “I said to myself: what if I woke up, and every single day I did everything within my ability during that day to change my life. What could happen in just a month? A year?”

— Liz Murray

12. “In the years ahead of me, I learned that the world is actually filled with people ready to tell you how likely something is, and what it means to be realistic. But what I have also learned is that no one, no one truly knows what is possible until they go and do it.”

— Liz Murray

13. “Instead, what I was beginning to understand was that however things unfolded from here on, whatever the next chapter was, my life could never be the sum of one circumstance. It would be determined, as it had always been, by my willingness to put one foot in front of the other, moving forward, come what may.”

— Liz Murray

14. “If I want to be a loving, generous, giving person, I’m not going to test the waters. I’m simply going to be a loving, generous, giving person.”

— Liz Murray

15. “This was the environment in which I finally came to my education, the environment in which I knew I could no longer lie in bed and give up. How could I pull the blanket back over my head when I knew my teachers were waiting for me? When they were willing to work so hard, how could I not do the same?”

— Liz Murray

16. “Life has a way of doing that; one minute everything makes sense, the next, things change. People get sick. Families break apart, your friends could close the door on you.”

— Liz Murray

17. “The lesson that people can’t give me what they don’t have, and if there’s anything I took from it, it was: okay, I don’t really expect anyone to hand me anything. There’s going to be me and the world.”

— Liz Murray

18. “Success creates opportunities for other people.”

— Liz Murray

19. “Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is.”

— Liz Murray

20. “The more needy I kept myself, the more it would always be up to other people what happened to me, I decided I would make my life so full of things that empowered me, people like this woman would shrink away, until they disappeared from my sight.”

— Liz Murray

21. “If I had a magic wand, I would live in a building in New York, big enough so my friends, my family could all have apartments in it. We’d raise our kids in the same space and have backyard barbecues and get old and fat together.”

— Liz Murray

22. “Life has a way of doing that; one minute everything makes sense, the next, things change. People get sick. Families break apart, your friends could close the door on you. The rapid changes I had experienced were hitting me hard as I sat there, and yet sadness wasn’t what came up in my gut. Out of nowhere, for whatever reason, a different feeling snuck up in its place, hope. If life could change for the worst, I thought, the maybe life could change for the better.”

— Liz Murray

23. “Gene Murry, the box said, underscored by bold letters reading, Head, and Feet, to note the direction. Carlos knew how much that bothered me. With his black marker, he drew a flowing angel on the front of your box, and filled in all the correct information: Jean Marie Murray. August 27, 1954–December 18, 1996. Beloved Mother of Lisa and Elizabeth Murray and Wife of Peter Finnerty.”

— Liz Murray

24. “In this way, compared to some, I could have explained to Carlos, I had it easy. I’d been practicing all my life for this, carrying things. For others it came as a shock. No matter how exhausted we were or what slant he put on our situation, I was only breaking night, fending off the dark until the sun rose each day, when I’d start over, ready and able to do it again.”

— Liz Murray

25. “As well as being blind, Ma turned out to have the same mental illness that her mother had had. Between 1986 and 1990, she suffered six schizophrenic bouts, each requiring her to be institutionalised for up to three months.”

— Liz Murray

26. “It’s not that we didn’t love one another- we did. I just think we didn’t know how to be with one another anymore. No one had prepared us for this, for what to do when tragedy breaks up your family. We had no idea what to do when disease took hold, mental illness struck, when Ma died. And we weren’t prepared for what happens when proximity no longer brings you together, and instead connecting became a matter of making an effort toward one another. We were doing the best we cold with what we had.”

— Liz Murray

27. “Out of nowhere, for whatever reason, a different feeling snuck up in its place, and hope. If life could change for the worst, I thought, then maybe life could change for the better.”

— Liz Murray

28. “Wherever you go, you’ll make the best of things. Look at your life, you already have... That’s why I know you’ll be all right... Try and relax, have some compassion for yourself.”

— Liz Murray

29. “Ma was legally blind due to a degenerative eye disease she’d had since birth. This meant she was entitled to welfare, and our lives revolved around the first day of every month when her payment was due.”

— Liz Murray

30. “My mother used to sit at the foot of my bed and she would share her dreams with me.”

— Liz Murray

31. “Since as far back as I could remember, I’d felt that Lisa’s responses toward me usually bordered on the brink of hostility. Years later, a therapist would explain that growing up with few resources had turned us into competitors- over food, over our parents’ love, over everything. At the moment, we were competing for who had the better handle on Ma’s illness, and we both knew she was winning.”

— Liz Murray

32. “Without a shared living situation to connect us, Daddy, Lisa, ad I spun out of one another’s orbits and made independent lives of our own that barely even touched. By the time I finished my first year of high school, the truth was, we barely knew one another.”

— Liz Murray