Liz Murray Quotes

I feel like my life has been a series of miracles. I was in every sense a lost cause.

Success creates opportunities for other people.

This fork in the road happens over a hundred times a day, and it’s the choices that you make that will determine the shape of your life.

I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.

When you take charge of your own narrative, it gives you a handle on it.

I think there is something to be said for what you can do when you don’t know what you aren’t supposed to be able to do.

I’d been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends’ houses, sometimes in the subway.

If I had a magic wand, I would live in a building in New York, big enough so my friends, my family could all have apartments in it. We’d raise our kids in the same space and have backyard barbecues and get old and fat together.

Life takes on the meaning that you give it.

… In our family, if you said the words ‘I feel,’ they better be followed with ‘hungry’ or ‘cold’. Because we didn’t get personal, that’s just how it was.

The lesson that people can’t give me what they don’t have, and if there’s anything I took from it, it was: okay, I don’t really expect anyone to hand me anything. There’s going to be me and the world.

I had a calling inside of me. I had a sense that when I was going through experiences like living on the streets, losing my parents to AIDS, just having my whole world turned upside-down, there was this feeling inside of me like I was meant for something greater.

I’ve learned in my life that you really don’t know what’s possible until you’re already doing it.

Anything that is within someone else’s reach is also within yours. Set your goals no matter how impossible they may seem. Then focus on what is between you and that goal. And then, simply take out the obstacles as they come.

I have just one black and white photograph left of my mother when she was younger. She was 17 when it was taken and beautiful with wispy curls and eyes that shone like dark marbles.

Like my mother, I was always saying, ‘I’ll fix my life one day.’ It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.

I realized eventually that when I ran out of places to stay and found myself on the D train and in Central Park, I was actually homeless.

My mother used to sit at the foot of my bed and she would share her dreams with me.

There’s always a way through things if you work hard enough and look close. It all depends on your level of determination.