Liz Murray Quotes

#1. 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.

Liz Murray

#2. As well as being blind, Ma turned out to have the same mental illness that her mother had had. Between 1986 and 1990, she suffered six schizophrenic bouts, each requiring her to be institutionalised for up to three months.

Liz Murray

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

Liz Murray

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

Liz Murray

#5. After all, isn't that what really draws the line between childhood and adulthood, knowing that you are solely responsible for yourself? If so, then my childhood ended at fifteen.

Liz Murray

#6. Shortly after I turned 13, Child Welfare took me into care. I was sent to a residential centre where girls with behavioural problems were 'evaluated'. My time there comes back to me now only in flashes of smells, images and sounds.

Liz Murray

#7. One point of view gives a one dimensional world.

Liz Murray

#8. All around us, people were cool. By association, so were we.

Liz Murray

#9. If I want to be a loving, generous, giving person, I'm not going to test the waters. I'm simply going to be a loving, generous, giving person.

Liz Murray

#10. 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.

Liz Murray

#11. This was the environment in which I finally came to my education, the environment in which I knew I could no longer lie in bed and give up. How could I pull the blanket back over my head when I knew my teachers were waiting for me? When they were willing to work so hard, how could I not do the same?

Liz Murray

#12. 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.

Liz Murray

#13. 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.

Liz Murray

#14. When I grew up in the Bronx, we always had everyone telling us, 'Watch out for the system, watch out for child welfare, watch out, they'll get you,' and I grew up with this feeling of, 'Society is over there and they're dangerous and not safe.'

Liz Murray

#15. 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.

Liz Murray

#16. Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is.

Liz Murray

#17. But avoidance allows you to believe that you're making all kinds of strides when you're not.

Liz Murray

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

Liz Murray

#19. Success creates opportunities for other people.

Liz Murray

#20. Your potential in this world is timeless

Liz Murray

#21. Ma was legally blind due to a degenerative eye disease she'd had since birth. This meant she was entitled to welfare, and our lives revolved around the first day of every month when her payment was due.

Liz Murray

#22. When you go back to your environment and you deal with employees ... do you inspire people or do you make them feel fear? Do you make them feel confident or incompetent? I think that distinction really marks the leader.

Liz Murray

#23. 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.

Liz Murray

#24. You are bigger than your circumstances.

Liz Murray

#25. Homeless person or business person, doctor or teacher, whatever your background may be, the same holds true for each of us: life takes on the meaning that you give it.

Liz Murray

#26. Life has a way of doing that; one minute everything makes sense, the next, things change. People get sick. Families break apart, your friends could close the door on you.

Liz Murray

#27. I knew at that moment I had to make a choice ... I could submit to everything and live a life of excuses, or I could push myself ... I could push myself and make my life good ...

Liz Murray

#28. I said to myself: what if I woke up, and every single day I did everything within my ability during that day to change my life. What could happen in just a month? A year?

Liz Murray

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

Liz Murray

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

Liz Murray

#31. 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.

Liz Murray

#32. In the years ahead of me, I learned that the world is actually filled with people ready to tell you how likely something is, and what it means to be realistic. But what I have also learned is that no one, no one truly knows what is possible until they go and do it.

Liz Murray

#33. 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.

Liz Murray

#34. Dream, but don't sleep.

Liz Murray