Top 25 Quotes by Elizabeth Smart of 35 - Page 2

Always that tyrannical love reaches out. Soft words shrivel me like quicklime. She will not allow me to be cold, hungry. She will insist that I take her own coat, her own food.

Always that tyrannical love reaches out. Soft words shrivel me like quicklime. She will not allow me to be cold, hungry. She will insist that I take her own coat, her own food.

Elizabeth Smart

Coats, Cold, Hungry

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

Elizabeth Smart

Lying, Long, Lizards

Elizabeth Smart (1945). “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept ; And, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals”, Vintage

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

Memories, Nurse, Facts

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

Oil, Roots, Machines

Elizabeth Smart, Alice Van Wart (1991). “Necessary secrets: the journals of Elizabeth Smart”, Grafton Books

You have to be slightly blind to believe in any cause.

Elizabeth Smart

Believe, Causes, Blind

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

Elizabeth Smart

Flower, Moving, Writing

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.

Elizabeth Smart

Desire, Obsession, Menagerie

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

Spring, Moon, Bird

Elizabeth Smart, Alice Van Wart (1991). “Necessary secrets: the journals of Elizabeth Smart”, Grafton Books