Elizabeth Smart
If I get to the end of my life, if I die, and I find out religion is one big lie, I still won't regret it because it's helped me to live a better life, to be a better person, to care about people, to believe in forgiveness, to believe in hope.Collection: Religion
I think forgiveness is probably one of the greatest forms of self-love there is because you don't do forgiveness for anybody else. My captors will never care if I forgive them... It will not make a day of difference to them at all, but it will make a huge difference to me.Collection: Forgiveness
I see myself as a survivor, and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a survivor. To me, survivor implies strength, implies that I have been through something and I made it out the other side.Collection: Strength
This life is a test, and we're put down here to make choices. The truth is, the bad choices of other people can hurt us.
I was broken beyond repair.
That was very comforting to me to hold onto that belief, that I did have a heavenly Father who was watching over me.
You are always special. Nothing can change that.
Usually, my husband is a pretty good rock, a pretty good sounding board... He definitely brings a center of gravity into my life.
I'm grateful for rain because, when I was kidnapped, that meant that I had something to drink.
That happened to me, but I'm so much more than that girl that was kidnapped.
Privacy is so sacred, and any time a victim is returned, a survivor is found and rescued, privacy is one of the greatest gifts we can give them because if they decide to share, that's up to them, and they will come forward.
There's only one of you in the entire history of the world, and there will only ever be one of you.
Religion has been a huge part of my life.
My parents have raised me to believe in a kind and a loving God and someone who cares about me, who is always there for me, and who would never wish harm or illness or any kind of tragedy upon me.
I will never regret being there for my children, watching them, making sure they'll be okay. But I might regret not being there for them.
Even when I get on airplanes, very often, as I walk down the aisle, I notice a lot of people staring or whispering. I recognize the fact that yes, to a lot of people, I will always be that 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and who was held captive.
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.
It is wrong for any person to ever judge someone in any situation saying, 'Well, why didn't you try to run? Why didn't you scream? Why didn't you try to do something?' That is so wrong and, frankly, offensive to even ask that question.
I don't feel famous personally, and I feel like when most people get to know me, they're like, 'Oh, she's just the same as everybody else.'
When I look in the mirror, I also see a mother and a wife and someone I am proud to be. I see an advocate. I see a survivor.
I can say I have forgiven my captors. That being said, I never want to see them again. I'm not OK with they did to me.
I will feel like a success if I raise my children to be kind and happy people.
The #MeToo campaign is monumental. It is giving a voice to so many too scared to speak out before.
My children have brought so much happiness and joy. To me, they're the very definition of love.
I wake up every morning, and I feel like a very lucky and blessed woman.
I've got great dogs. I've got a great family. I mean, I couldn't be happier.
Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Grateful
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.Collection: Happens
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.Collection: Leadership
Knowing it can always get worse, I try to be grateful for whatever good I have.Collection: Grateful
You will always have value and nothing can change that.Collection: Values
I like to think that we’re not defined by what happens to us…because so many times they’re beyond our control. I like to think that we’re defined by our choices and our decisions.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Fate
I am possessed by love and have no options.Collection: Possessed
All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was.Collection: Time
Work is the only only only remedy for life: for happiness, for interest, for stability, for security. Hard, willed work. Oh work!Collection: Stability
I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Past
Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.Collection: Talking
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.Collection: Girl
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?Collection: Running
What you forget is that plants themselves want to live as much as you want them to. More.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Wings
Go to the ant, thou sluggard, learn to live, and by her busy ways, reform thy own.Collection: Reform
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?Collection: Hate
But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.Collection: Soul
I feel helpless, hopeless, too low to call out, too weak to think. Impotent tears dribble down.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Friday
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.Collection: Doors