Elizabeth Smart > Quotes

“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.”
― Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals

“I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. And if she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no-one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness.

All people seem criminally irrelevant. I ignore everyone and everything, and, if crossed or interrupted in my decay, hate. Nature is only the irking weather and flowers crude reminders of stale states of being.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate.

Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour.
Oh, canary, sing out in the thunderstorm, prove your yellow pride. Give me a reason for courage or a way to be brave. But nothing tangible comes to rescue my besieged sanity, and I cannot decipher the code of the eucalyptus thumping on my roof.
I am unnerved by the opponents of God, and God is out of earshot. 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.
The parchment philosopher has no traffic with the night, and no conception of the price of love. With smoky circles of thought he tries to combat the fog, and with anagrams to defeat anatomy. I posture in vain with his weapons, even though I am balmed with his nicotine herbs.
Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“No, my advocates, my angels with sadist eyes, this is the beginning of my life, or the end. So I lean affirmation across the cafe table, and surrender my fifty years away with an easy smile. But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“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.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“A pen is a furious weapon. But it needs a rage of will.”
― Elizabeth Smart

“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.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold on to. I dare not be without a cigarette in my hand. If I should be looking the other way when the hour of doom is struck, how shall I avoid being turned into stone unless I can remember something to do which will lead me back to the simplicity and safety of daily living?”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind. All martyrdoms are in vain. He also is drowning in the blood of too much sacrifice.

Lay aside the weapons, love, for all battles are lost.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“I feel helpless, hopeless, too low to call out, too weak to think. Impotent tears dribble down.”
― Elizabeth Smart

“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.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“Only remember: I am not the ease, but the end.
I am not to blind you, but to find you.
What you think is the sirens singing to lure you to your doom is only the voice of the inevitable, welcoming you after so long a wait. I was made only for you.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“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.”
― Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals

“Work is the only only only remedy for life: for happiness, for interest, for stability, for security. Hard, willed work. Oh work!”
― Elizabeth Smart, Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart

“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.”
― Elizabeth Smart, Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart

“The temperament of a dandelion or cosmic preservation. Where does wonder begin?”
― Elizabeth Smart, Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart

“Swearing invulnerably, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“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. ”
― Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals

“It is enough, the now, and though it comes without anything, it gives me everything.
With it I can repopulate the world. I can bring forth new worlds in underground shelters while the bombs are dropping above; I can do it in lifeboats as the ship goes down; I can do it in prisons without the guard's permission; and O, when I do it quietly in the lobby while the conference is going on, a lot of states-men will emerge twirling their moustaches, and see the birth blood, and know they have been foiled.
Love is strong as death.”
― Elizabeth Smart

“He is mad.
I am mad too, with an inward curtain-like madness. A pall.
There is no illumination.”
― Elizabeth Smart, On the side of the angels: The second volume of the journals of Elizabeth Smart

“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.”
― Elizabeth Smart, Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart

“My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no brakes?
It stalled in the traffic and broke down outside her window. She was writing a letter: I love you very much: Careful Now in capitals.
That was a different letter.
Yes, but I get confused. One day she saw a golden oriel in the orchard. One day she said, Then have your orgy with Blondie, work out your passion on her.
I see it all, the poop of burnished gold. If I got angry and made a scene?
But No. No.
No, I believe you, of course, I believe you for didn't you say I was the one? Yes, you said, Take care of this girl for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return.
This was my dream, and why I had circles under my eyes this morning at breakfast. Everyone noticed it, and I think one of them sniggered.
You don't take much interest in politics, do you? You never read the newspapers? I drank my coffee, but I had a slight feeling of nausea. It's to be expected, I don't mind it at all, it's nothing.
My love, are you feeling better?
He can't talk, he can only mutter.
O my dear, O my dear, drink a little milk, lie down and rest a little. I will comfort you. I can carry love like Saint Christopher. It is heavy, but I can carry it. It's the stones of suspicion I stumble on. Did I say suspicion? No.
No. No. It's nothing. I love you. A slight feeling of nausea, that's all.
After a while I got out into the open air, and his face was the moon hanging in the snowy branches.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“Day deceives, but at night no one is safe from hallucinations.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

“So there are to be no obsequies. There is to be no mention of that which was to have conquered the world, and after the world, death. Not one of all these martyrs nailed to every tree in the western hemisphere will find favour in the editor's measuring eye. On the amusement page, to fill up space, one inch and a half, perhaps, of those who were forced to die. Butter is up ten cents. The human being is down.”
― Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept