Lois has been a loyal wife, and extraordinary mother, who has had to endure an impossible part of this journey. I deeply regret the excruciating pain this has caused her. my parents taught me as a young child that they would love me unconditionally no matter what happened.

Elizabeth Smart

Categorized in : U.S.

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

Elizabeth Smart

tomorrow sleep trying

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.

Elizabeth Smart

achieve grateful greatness

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

Elizabeth Smart

grateful knowing trying

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.

Elizabeth Smart

pain wisdom leadership

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.

Elizabeth Smart

vanity earth way

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.

Elizabeth Smart

happens

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

Elizabeth Smart

stability remedy interest

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

Elizabeth Smart

i-have-learned smoke needs

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

Elizabeth Smart

all-time can-do time

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.

Elizabeth Smart

fate journey trials

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?

Elizabeth Smart

heart running sex

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

girl angel hair

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?

Elizabeth Smart

hate done war

I am possessed by love and have no options.

Elizabeth Smart

possessed

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.

Elizabeth Smart

choices decision thinking

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.

Elizabeth Smart

forgiving looks past

You will always have value and nothing can change that.

Elizabeth Smart

values

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

Elizabeth Smart

language feelings talking

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

crowds doors looks

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

Elizabeth Smart

lizards long lying