Top 100 Maggie Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.”

— Maggie Smith

52. “Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling – love, anger, gratitude, grief – it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.”

— Maggie Smith

53. “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. – Emily Dickinson.”

— Maggie Smith

54. “Let the hard days be hard. When you mourn a person, it’s a form of love. You mourn their loss because they mattered, because the world without them is diminished. Sit still with your grief if you need to, then lift it and carry it with you. KEEP MOVING. Take stock of what you can see in your life now that parts of it are gone: What view has that space created?”

— Maggie Smith

55. “Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead. A woman whose husband dies is a widow. But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person – a child, a partner, an estranged family member or dear friend. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but you go on living. There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.”

— Maggie Smith

56. “Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.”

— Maggie Smith

57. “It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are. Be wary of those who don’t want you to change or grow. Grow anyway – there is no alternative.”

— Maggie Smith

58. “As if you have to break someone’s heart to make them strong. I could say you don’t get to take credit for someone’s growth if they grow as a result of what you put them through.”

— Maggie Smith

59. “I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.”

— Maggie Smith

60. “It’s too late to do anything about the inequity in my now-kaput marriage. But I made the list of tasks anyway. I wanted to see in black and white what I’d been doing in the marriage. Reader, I was going to show you the list, but I decided against it. You don’t need the list. Looking at it, I thought, No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own.”

— Maggie Smith

61. “I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”

— Maggie Smith

62. “Being strong, bracing yourself against hurt, can get in the way of actual healing; the real work.”

— Maggie Smith

63. “When life held your hand in the flames, it taught you something about the kind of burning you can endure. You survived: don’t forget that, and don’t diminish it. KEEP MOVING.”

— Maggie Smith

64. “Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.”

— Maggie Smith

65. “We all come into the world unfinished, still stitching ourselves together.”

— Maggie Smith

66. “It was a full-circle moment, and there would be many of them. Because time is recursive, because we repeat ourselves again and again, because all the things I’d done married I would now do unmarried. Because I was the same and completely different.”

— Maggie Smith

67. “Remember a time when you forgave someone, how freeing that felt. You deserve your mercy as much as anyone else does. Forgive yourself for something today, something you wish you’d done differently. Just let it go. Free yourself from it.”

— Maggie Smith

68. “That bit of blue doesn’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to the sky, or to the earth, or to us. Isn’t that what you’ve been taught – nothing is ours? Haven’t you learned to keep the loosest possible hold?”

— Maggie Smith

69. “Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.”

— Maggie Smith

70. “Close the gap between yourself and your spirit – the person you know you can be. Let your choices reflect the person you want to become, not just the person you think you are.”

— Maggie Smith

71. “Don’t wait for your life to magically come together – it’s your work to do. Every day, every moment, you are making your life from scratch. Today, take one step, however small, toward creating a life you can be proud of.”

— Maggie Smith

72. “I have to trust this: If what I give my children is love, then they’re receiving it. If I seek to understand them, then they will feel understood. Embraced. Fathomed.”

— Maggie Smith

73. “Fight the urge to withdraw, to fold in on yourself, as if your pain is contagious and might infect someone else. We are here to take care of one another; the care is what’s catching, spreading person to person to person. So take – and give – care.”

— Maggie Smith

74. “Think of what you’ve achieved that didn’t seem possible last year, or five years ago, or ten; it didn’t seem possible then but you’ve proven that it was. Now imagine what might be possible in another year or five or ten. KEEP MOVING. Ask yourself what you would do if you had an unlimited supply of both courage and hope. Now begin answering that question with action. Take one step today – then repeat, repeat, repeat.”

— Maggie Smith

75. “You don’t have to be in love to have love in your life. Take stock of everything – and everyone – that fills your heart.”

— Maggie Smith

76. “What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.”

— Maggie Smith

77. “When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.”

— Maggie Smith

78. “Likewise, parents are not wise oracles – they’re just people trying to shepherd other people through the world. We may know the right path to take, but knowing the way and consistently walking it are two different things. Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.”

— Maggie Smith

79. “I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.”

— Maggie Smith

80. “Your work is being yourself, offering what you can to others. You’ve been doing it all along. Now do it with intention.”

— Maggie Smith

81. “The body remains a house unaware of its rooms.”

— Maggie Smith

82. “I’m trying so hard to forgive. I’m wishing hard for peace in every superstitious way. Wishing for it deep inside me, where the truest things live.”

— Maggie Smith

83. “Recognize the difference between The End and An End.”

— Maggie Smith

84. “It’s late but everything comes next.”

— Maggie Smith

85. “I wanted to save my marriage, but I wanted to save it without anyone knowing it needed saving. That is some serious firstborn-daughter energy right there.”

— Maggie Smith

86. “The mind is mysterious. A master of sleight of hand.”

— Maggie Smith

87. “By the time you’re reading this sentence, I want to have let go, to have wrestled myself free of this ghost, to have forgiven. I want to be able to say, Thank you, pain, for being my teacher. This book is my torma, my offering. Please take it. Taste its sweetness.”

— Maggie Smith

88. “This is what it is to be rooted in a place, or to have a place rooted inside you: Every bit means something to someone you know, and therefore, every bit means something to you.”

— Maggie Smith

89. “In all these places, I loved that person. I loved him. Where does that go? The love is in all of these places – haunting? – and in none of them. The love is everywhere and nowhere.”

— Maggie Smith

90. “Start making yourself at home in your life as it is.”

— Maggie Smith

91. “Nothing predates danger.”

— Maggie Smith

92. “It was completely illogical: as if part of me wanted him back, and part of me wanted him to disappear, and nothing in between would do. Or: I wanted my husband back, and I wanted the stranger he’d become to disappear.”

— Maggie Smith

93. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.”

— Maggie Smith

94. “I don’t have to understand everything, and I don’t believe understanding is owed me. I don’t get 2001: A Space OdysseyI – fine, I can live with that. But my own life? It would be nice to get it.”

— Maggie Smith

95. “Accept that you may never get to know what it means. Accept that there may not be a reason, despite the comfort that reasons provide. Don’t look for meaning in whatever collapsed around you; make meaning by digging yourself out.”

— Maggie Smith

96. “I’d been trying to save the marriage, but I needed to save myself.”

— Maggie Smith

97. “Speak without silencing others. Listen without losing your own voice. KEEP MOVING.”

— Maggie Smith

98. “There is a difference between what is built in the body and what is built in the imagination.”

— Maggie Smith

99. “I am offering the only thing I have. I am holding out my hand, feeding myself to the hungry future.”

— Maggie Smith

100. “My mother loved you as her own son and you broke her heart.”

— Maggie Smith