Maggie Smith > Quotes

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go.
Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.
Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence.
I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“When life held your hand in the flames, it taught you something about the kind of burning you can endure. You survived: don’t forget that, and don’t diminish it. KEEP MOVING.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“We talk so much of  light, please
let me speak on behalf

of  the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark

the beginning of a day is.

—Maggie Smith, from “How Dark the Beginning,” Poetry (February 2020)”
― Maggie Smith

“Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead. A woman whose husband dies is a widow. But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person—a child, a partner, an estranged family member or dear friend. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but you go on living. There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“Accept that you are a work in progress, both a revision and a draft: you are better and more complete than earlier versions of yourself, but you also have work to do. Be open to change. Allow yourself to be revised.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“This is what it is to be rooted in a place, or to have a place rooted inside you: Every bit means something to someone you know, and therefore, every bit means something to you.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“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, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“In all these places, I loved that person. I loved him. Where does that go? The love is in all of these places—haunting?—and in none of them. The love is everywhere and nowhere.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Don't wait for your life to magically come together--it's your work to do. Every day, every moment, you are making your life from scratch. Today, take one step, however small, toward creating a life you can be proud of.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“We all come into the world unfinished, still stitching ourselves together.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade. My kids didn’t want this lemonade. This lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote. I’ll drink to that.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“As if you have to break someone’s heart to make them strong. I could say you don’t get to take credit for someone’s growth if they grow as a result of what you put them through.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“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, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage. And then, this: But the best things remain.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“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, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling--love, anger, gratitude, grief--it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

“It’s a mistake to think of one’s life as plot, to think of the events of one’s life as events in a story. It’s a mistake. And yet, there’s foreshadowing everywhere, foreshadowing I would’ve seen myself if I’d been watching a play or reading a novel, not living a life.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“But the more time passed, the less I hurt. The less I hurt, the more I was able to see how beautiful, how full, my life was. I felt myself smiling as I walked in my neighborhood. My eyes followed the calls of birds to find them in the trees—grackles, woodpeckers, crows, robins, blue jays, cardinals. I’d built a life in which my days were like this: taking long walks, writing, mothering, cackling over coffee or cocktails with friends, sleeping alone some nights, being held close by someone I loved other nights. I was unfolding, learning to take up space. Life began to feel open enough, elastic enough, to contain whatever I might choose for it.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Close the gap between yourself and your spirit--the person you know you can be. Let your choices reflect the person you want to become, not just the person you think you are.”
― Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change