Top 100 Maggie Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Sort of what you do in drama school when asked to play something way out of your reach. Anyway, we used to laugh a lot about that. I used to say I’m not going to act old, Penelope. I’ll just be myself.”

— Maggie Smith

52. “Give the present the gift of your full attention.”

— Maggie Smith

53. “There were male colleges, and there were very few female colleges.”

— Maggie Smith

54. “There was nobody in the family who had ever done anything like that before. My brothers – I had two brothers. They were twins. They both became architects. They were both six years older.”

— Maggie Smith

55. “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

56. “I am just surprised to be doing anything at my age actually. When you think of where I am now and where I’ve come from, I am very pleased and very grateful to be standing up and delivering Julian’s great lines.”

— 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. “Listen, I must be 110 by now. Granny is going to kick the bucket at some point.”

— Maggie Smith

59. “It was – it’s always very nice to be somebody rather grand.”

— Maggie Smith

60. “When you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”

— Maggie Smith

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Chris and Toby are far too sane to be upset any more.”

— Maggie Smith

64. “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

65. “Where you get people who want to take a picture of you or take a picture of them with you.”

— Maggie Smith

66. “My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.”

— Maggie Smith

67. “I don’t think films about elderly people have been made very much.”

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “Do not be ashamed of the intensity of your emotion. That’s your humanity. Grief can be feral, wild, frightening. Give it a safe place to live.”

— Maggie Smith

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

86. “No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own.”

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

91. “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

92. “The thing is, flowers die when you pick them. As soon as you cut them and put them in a vase, the clock’s on. You’re displaying them as something beautiful, and the whole time they’re decomposing. Sometimes I think our marriage was like that. As soon as it began, it was beginning to end.”

— Maggie Smith

93. “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

95. “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

96. “I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade. My kids didn’t want this lemonade. This lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote. I’ll drink to that.”

— Maggie Smith

97. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

99. “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

100. “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