Elizabeth Smart quotes:

Vanity is a vital aid to nature: completely and absolutely necessary to life. It is one of nature's ways to bind you to the earth.

If I had my wilderness, nature could be my lover. What can I do in the paved streets for my thirsty roots? I waste time. I encourage fools. I slip the vital hours into penny slot machines -- to pass time, to start my stuck wheels only love can oil.

Yesterday from my office window I saw a crippled girl negotiating her way across the street, her shoulders squarely braced. At each jerky movement her hair flew back like an annunciatory angel, and I saw she was the only dancer on the street.

I am over-run, jungled in my bed, I am infested with a menagerie of desires: my heart is eaten by a dove, a cat scrambles in the cave of my sex, hounds in my bed obey a whipmaster who cries nothing but havoc as the hours test my endurance with an accumulation of tortures. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

April 19 And now it is spring. Birds are singing. Wistful notes and jubilant. And bare streets and no need for coats, and skipping ropes and bicycles and a thin new moon.

We can choose to allow our experiences to hold us back, and to not allow us to become great or achieve greatness in this life. Or we can allow our experiences to push us forward, to make us grateful for every day we have and to be all the more thankful for those who are around us.

I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me.

But the human spirit is resilient. God made us so. He gave us the ability to forgive. To leave our past behind. To look forward instead of back.

I feel helpless, hopeless, too low to call out, too weak to think. Impotent tears dribble down.

You have to be slightly blind to believe in any cause.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard, learn to live, and by her busy ways, reform thy own.

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.

So the price of careless rapture is a twisted history chronicled by envy. You were too busy being. And you are too busy now. You couldn't spare the time to note down a few facts: how the sun and silence poured into the big room with the yellow curtains; how everything was never-ending and expendable."

Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow.

Work is the only only only remedy for life: for happiness, for interest, for stability, for security. Hard, willed work. Oh work!

Knowing it can always get worse, I try to be grateful for whatever good I have.

O I know they make war because they want peace; they hate so that they may live; and they destroy the present to make the world safe for the future. When have they not done and said they did it for that?

I am possessed by love and have no options.

I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.

Always that tyrannical love reaches out. Soft words shrivel me like quicklime. She will not allow me to be cold, hungry. She will insist that I take her own coat, her own food.

All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was.

Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.

Life is a journey for us all. We all face trials. We all have ups and downs. All of us are human. But we are also the masters of our fate. We are the ones who decide how we are going to react to life.

Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day. The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up. The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power. The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different. The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees. In the end they all died.

It's because I'm only interested in the big things that I'm not interested in politics.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

What you forget is that plants themselves want to live as much as you want them to. More.

You will always have value and nothing can change that.

I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning.It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone.Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.

It's not what happens to us that defines us. It's what we choose to do with what happens to us that defines us.

How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.

You have to have short fingernails or they'd just break off, and you can't wear red polish - it looks like your fingers are bleeding.