Olivia

“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

“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

“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

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