Top 120 Maggie Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

— Maggie Smith

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

105. “Stop focusing on what is behind you. It’s growing smaller and smaller, miniaturizing in the distance; stop squinting at it, as if it has answers. Today, keep your eyes on where you are going, not where you have been.”

— Maggie Smith

106. “We can endure anything if we know when it will end, but I had no idea when it would end.”

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

108. “Is this why we write? To bronze the baby shoes? To save all of it? The zippered coats, the somehow endless buckling and unbuckling of car seat harnesses, the sticky hands, the fought naps, the acorns secreted into my pockets and purses, the crumbs on everything, always?”

— Maggie Smith

109. “Maybe I shouldn’t have accepted any of them, but I was trying to keep the peace. Now I think, What peace?”

— Maggie Smith

110. “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

111. “You are not betraying your grief by feeling joy. You are not being graded, and you do not receive extra credit for being miserable 100% of the time. Find pockets of relief, even happiness, when and where you can. KEEP MOVING.”

— Maggie Smith

112. “Most importantly, he redlined any instance of me crying. The man I’d befriended in a writing workshop tried to delete my grief on the page. Redacting tears? That was a new one. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t accept those edits.”

— Maggie Smith

113. “I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.”

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

115. “When I traveled, I planned carefully for minimal disruption to his schedule. I arranged playdates for after school or asked my parents for help. But I couldn’t pack lunches ahead, give baths ahead, make breakfasts ahead, get the kids dressed ahead, anticipate fevers or stomach flus ahead. Some things would have to be done in real time.”

— Maggie Smith

116. “A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,’ and part of the art is in the curation.”

— Maggie Smith

117. “Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves – our together selves – to find it.”

— Maggie Smith

118. “He doesn’t pass these landmarks from our years together every day, but I do. I still live in one of them. Do those memories warp without their mirrors, without someone to reflect them, to keep them true, to show them their twin? Do our separate memories grow on their own into two different things, unrecognizable to one another? Do we?”

— Maggie Smith

119. “The Finder stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life. Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipsis: dot dot dot.”

— Maggie Smith

120. “Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible. I went to find beauty, and it was still there. I go looking for it, and it’s there.”

— Maggie Smith

121. “Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

— Maggie Smith

122. “BRIDE How long have I been wed to myself? Calling myself darling, dressing for my own pleasure, each morning choosing perfume to turn me on. How long have I been alone in this house but not alone? Married less to the man than to the woman silvering with the mirror. I know the kind of wife I need and I become her: the one who will leave this earth at the same instant I do. I am my own bride, lifting the veil to see my face. Darling, I say, I have waited for you all my life.”

— Maggie Smith

123. “A silver lining of being alone is being with someone you can trust, someone you respect and understand. You can let your guard down when you’re by yourself. You can give yourself permission to live your authentic life, without apology. You can love yourself in a way that no one else can.”

— Maggie Smith

124. “This isn’t a tell-all because some of what I’m telling you is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too – the spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem: What is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences.”

— Maggie Smith

125. “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

126. “How I picture it: For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it. I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.”

— Maggie Smith

127. “Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.”

— Maggie Smith

128. “Nothing predates danger.”

— Maggie Smith

129. “Memory, too, is assemblage – a kind of cento, collaged from pieces. From the scraps of a life.”

— Maggie Smith

130. “But feeling lonely when you’re with your partner is worse than being alone. Being with someone who doesn’t want the best for you is worse than being alone. I could say that when I think about my dream partner, what I want in that person is so basic, so low-bar, I’m almost ashamed to say it out loud: Someone who’s happy to see me. Someone who smiles when I walk into a room. Someone who can be happy with me and for me.”

— Maggie Smith

131. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist advised, if you want to change. If you’re in enough pain, you won’t be able to continue living the way you’ve been living; you’ll have to do something differently. But be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it – and then what? Then the pain is yours. The pain is yours and it will change you.”

— Maggie Smith

132. “You know what one of the saddest damn things is? One of the parts of all this that I’m grieving the most? When I lost my marriage, I lost all that shared history. I lost the person who knew me in a way no one else does, and when I lost him, I also lost being known like that.”

— Maggie Smith