Top 120 Maggie Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

110. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

112. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “Nothing predates danger.”

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

124. “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

125. “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

126. “I’d done “Gosford Park,” a film that Julian Fellowes had written that Robert Altman directed.”

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

128. “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

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

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith

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

— Maggie Smith