Lisa Marie Presley Quotes

This was a huge lesson for me—the only way out is through. You must allow pain in to free yourself from it.

Grief settles. It's not something you overcome. It's something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important. The truth is that I don't remember who I was.

And if I was Lisa Marie Presley and I'd told you I was going to marry Michael Jackson because I liked the shape of his nose, or rather, noses, and he's just a sweet boy who loves children, I mean really loves children, and his dramatic change in appearance was undoubtedly a result of a genuine bona fide skin disease, would you have said anything?

If you don’t have something to keep you focused, or some kind of purpose, it’s hard out there.

Then they took me home to Graceland.

He was respectful, though—he wasn’t rude to people, he wasn’t an angry person, he didn’t live there. Some people full-on live in destruction, others buy some real estate and walk around in anger for a little while. My dad would just visit.

Looking back, there was really only one thing I was sure of: that I was loved by my dad.

In my family, there’s a long history of young girls becoming mothers—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother all had their first babies young, when they were just babies themselves.

I believe that a body is just a body, and the spirit is ultimately inside of the physical shell, and I don’t think chemicals have anything to do with the spirit. They make the physical addiction to the body—but the root of the addiction comes from being really unhappy. That’s a spiritual problem.

My father was my mom’s biggest protector throughout her whole adult life. She had many friends that came and went, but he was there from when she was seventeen until the moment she died. He was the last person with her.

Don't kill your best friend, he (Elvis) said. Words of wisdom.

I know that I acted like a princess sometimes. But it’s strange, because I was—am—filled with self-doubt. It was all very confusing.

He could have said, “Chop both of your feet off,” and I would have done it.

Back then, everyone in Hollywood seemed to be an addict, but no one had a language for it.

Eventually, he calmed down, and someone said to me, “It’s okay, you can come out now, he wants to see you.” I thought, He wants to see me? I said, “Why was he so mad?” “Well,” someone said, “he ran out of water.” So, I grabbed four bottles of water and I walked into his room. “Somebody told me you didn’t have any water,” I said, and he just motioned for me to come give him a hug.

In California, when I was with my mother, I had a nanny named Yuki Koshimata. Yuki was a short Japanese woman, and she took really good care of me. She was always there—she wrote to me until the day she died. I would get cards every Christmas, every birthday, even after I got married and had children. Whenever we dropped Yuki off at her house for her weekend, or her time off, I would scream. I remember being in the car with my mom driving away and I would be screaming at the top of my lungs, watching us drive out of view of her. I was so attached to her.

I think most people have a natural instinct to rebel.” — ELVIS PRESLEY

I just wanted to check out. It was too painful to be sober.

I know how heavy grief makes my body feel.

... I feel a longing, a nostalgia for something I never lived. I've never lived in Memphis. But something inside of me has.

I was Eloise at the Plaza. I'm not proud of it.

I kept my watch on Memphis time.

Just as Elvis had with his mother, and my mom had with Elvis, my brother and my mom had a kind of "I can't live without you" relationship. They shared a very deep soul bond.

... in the depths of her addiction, my mom would often drive the two hundred miles southwest to Graceland to sleep in her dad's bed. It seemed like the only place she found any comfort.

But for me, the most compelling evidence that Elvis did indeed fake his own death was a tissue sample taken from a biopsy Elvis had in 1975 to check for Hepatitis. This shows the DNA is different to DNA obtained from Elvis's 1977 autopsy. A major news agency conducted an independent back up test, and the results were the same. The autopsy tissue purportedly Elvis's did not match the known tissue from the 1975 sample. This summarily proves that the person autopsied was not Elvis Presley. I’ll let you ingest that bit of information for a second… Yes, that’s correct. The DNA from Elvis’s liver biopsy taken in 1975 didn’t match the DNA taken from his autopsy. Mind blowing, huh? Fox news contacted Lisa Marie’s representatives and asked for a DNA sample so they could obtain the truth once and for all, but, surprise, surprise, she declined.

looked at my face as a child and thought, My God, if only anyone could have told you what you were going to go through in this life, what you were going to be up against. That cute little blond-haired child in the matching dress with her mommy. It overwhelmed me.

When my brother died, I was hit with the realization that he was nowhere to be found on Earth. I could travel anywhere and never find him. No matter how far I flew, how far I drove, how far I walked, he was gone.

That second time, I didn’t know what to do, and neither did Danny. I ended up having an abortion. And it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I was devastated. I did it and we both cried. We were both destroyed and not long after that we fell apart and broke up. I couldn’t live with myself. Danny went off to join the band on a cruise ship that traveled through the Caribbean. I went and traveled through Europe on a Eurail Pass for a couple of months. All the while, I could not believe that I had had an abortion. I was so upset with myself. So I made a plan. I planned and I plotted and I schemed. I pinpointed exactly when I was ovulating—I even went to Memphis first to hang out with my aunt Patsy and work out how to make it happen. It was a group effort. I had it down to a science—then purposely planned a trip to see Danny on the ship. We went to the island of Aruba or somewhere for the night. I remember getting back on the ship hoping I’d fucking done it. Danny had no idea of my plan. But I didn’t really care anymore what he thought about it. I didn’t care if he wanted to be part of it or not. I felt that I had to redeem, to make amends, because I still couldn’t believe I had had an abortion. I thought, I’m going to have this child. There is a child that I need to be having. I would be talking to the lost child, saying, “I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I fucking did that. Please forgive me and stay with me until I get pregnant again.

One of my dad’s visits to anger came one time when we were supposed to go to Libertyland. I had invited all my friends, but when I went upstairs the night before, I could hear the wrong kind of tone—this baritone sound, the wrong kind of intensity. I went to my room and could hear loud crashing sounds. He was yelling his fucking head off at somebody. I could hear him saying that we weren’t going to Libertyland the next day. I was devastated. I found out later that he had run out of something again, and he needed to get it before we went—either that or they wouldn’t give it to him. So, he hit the roof and called about ten different doctors and nurses until he found someone who would give him a fix. Once the nurse or doctor had administered whatever it was he needed, he was fine. And we went to Libertyland.

Iwas always worried about my dad dying. Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, “I hope my daddy doesn’t die.” He had a TV and a chair set up in my room, so he would often come by and lounge in the chair and smoke his cigars. I could wake up at any time and he’d be sitting there. Once, I was with a friend in my room and when he came to my bedroom door, he started to fall. I could tell that he was moving too far to the right, starting to lean, and I yelled, “Go get him!” Me and my friend managed to get underneath him and hold him up until he grabbed hold of something and regained his composure, and then he just went back to his room. That happened a few times—happy to see me, then the swaying. And it happened a lot toward the end. I was sitting next to him in my room watching TV and I said, “Daddy, please don’t go anywhere. Please don’t die.” He said, “I’m not going anywhere.” Then he smiled at me.

that I had to watch out for him. One time I was walking by his bedroom, and he was lying flat on his back. I saw how bloated his stomach was and it terrified me. A few days later I was in my room with my friends. We were in the hamburger bed, all watching that sad movie Brian’s Song. About halfway through the film, I suddenly got really worried about my dad and went into his bathroom, where I found him facedown. He had used the towel rack to hold on to, but it had broken and he’d fallen. I ran downstairs and got Delta; she called for help, and they got him up, gave him coffee, and got him walking. I watched them walk him around the room. He was clinging on to them. At one point his head was hanging down, but once he saw me in the chair, we locked eyes and his whole face lit up. He tried to get away from them to come over to where I was, but I could tell he was going to be sick. I said, “No, he’s going to throw up.” So they took him to the bathroom, and sure enough, he got sick. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t talk to anyone about anything. I just internalized it all.

That afternoon, once they took him away—and this is something I’ve been upset about my whole life—it turned into a free-for-all. Everybody went to town. Everything was swiped, wiped clean—jewelry, artifacts, personal items—before he was even pronounced dead. You can still find things from that day coming up at auction.

I heard my mother was coming for me. That was the worst. It felt like an invasion—Graceland was my place with my dad, and I didn’t want her there. She was going to wreck the whole vibe.

My mom stayed in Memphis until everything was finalized and in October my dad was moved from Forest Hill Cemetery to the backyard of Graceland, next to his mother. That was the first time I really felt the loss—obviously from my dad passing away, but more than anything, I felt I was stuck with this woman. It was a one-two punch: He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her.

After camp, my mom wanted me in a good school, so she put me in a ritzy one in Los Angeles. Everyone had a famous father and mother, and I wasn’t into that at all. Then my mom got a French boyfriend and became obsessed with being French, so she put me in a French school and made me do fucking French lessons. I wanted my other life back.

The first time Edwards came into my room in the middle of the night, drunk, kneeling, was years before. I think I was ten. I woke up to find him on his knees next to my bed, running his finger up my leg under the sheets, and if I moved, he stopped—so I moved. I was awake, but I was trying to be asleep. He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I get older. He was putting his hand on my chest and saying a man’s going to touch here, then he put his hand between my legs, and he said they’re going to touch you here. I think he gently kissed me and then left that night.

He’d still come into my room now and then, but I would move or do something to make him think that I was waking up, then he’d run down the hallway back to my mom’s room, freak out, and stay away.

By this point in my life, my mother’s role was just to be a chronic stop sign. She didn’t try to talk to me, hang out with me, be a friend. I was very much in love with my father’s side—they were wildly colorful people and I related to them in ways I couldn’t with my mother.

In the craziest turn of events, Edwards got a part in the movie Mommie Dearest, playing Joan Crawford’s lover. One day, while he was still making the movie, my mom came into my room, went through my closet, and was yelling at me because I had wire hangers: “Why are you using these? These come from the cleaners! These need to be exchanged for the nice ones, the plastic ones!” As she was yelling, we could hear laughter from down the hallway. “The irony!” Michael shouted. “This is too crazy that you’re actually yelling at your daughter about wire hangers and I’m in Mommie Dearest!” My mom realized that it was crazy and started laughing, too. I thought, This is my life now. You’re both fucking crazy.

One night my mom made dinner, and when I cut into the chicken, it wasn’t cooked, so I said so. The next thing I know, Edwards flipped his plate so that it flew across the room and smashed into the wall. I threw my hands up as if to say, “What the fuck?” and at that he jumped up and started screaming gibberish and ran out of the room. When he got back, he was holding the end of the cord that attached to my record player—he’d cut it off with scissors. He was still yelling.

When Ben died, I thought it would be a matter of hours until my mother relapsed. But she surprised me and remained completely sober to honor him. She really wanted to get her life together and help others somehow. She wanted to be of service. But she was too broken. My mom had my brother in the house with us instead of keeping him at the morgue. They told us that if we could tend to the body, we could have him at home, so she kept him in our house for a while on dry ice. It was really important for my mom to have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad. And I would go and sit in there with him.

We had to keep the room at 55 degrees. I still didn’t know where I was going to bury him—Hawaii, Graceland, Hawaii, Graceland—so that was part of why it took so long. But I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living fucking piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me. The normal process of death is: The person dies, they have an autopsy, viewing, funeral, buried, boom. It’s all over in a four- or five-day period, maybe a week if you’re lucky. But you don’t really have a chance to process it. I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.

After Ben Ben died, I knew my mom wouldn’t survive it for very long. She did not want to be here.

My mom was gone a lot. She was on some island eating something she caught out of the ocean, or she was off in some other foreign land, or she was on another adventure with another man,

I knew by then that she’d been thinking of putting me in a boarding school, in Switzerland or on a kibbutz in Israel—I had found four or five applications to different places. I felt like my mom was always actively trying to figure out how to send me away—

My grandfather had known that I’d had a crush on Rory Miller. After Vernon died, I found out the Millers were moving to Colorado. I was supposed to meet and hang out with Rory before they left—in fact, I’d arranged to spend the whole day with him. Patsy knew it and, last minute, I got a phone call: “Your mom wants you to fly home to L.A. today.” Patsy had told my mom, and my mom was not having it. I was devastated. Rory took me to the airport. That was the first time I remember having actual, real, specific hatred toward my mother.

I always wanted to go to Memphis. I wanted to make sure I could go to Memphis, and that’s what she used sometimes to threaten me: “You’re not going to be able to go to Memphis if you don’t blah, blah, blah…” and that would really upset me, but I would do whatever I needed to do. She knew it meant everything to me.

Upstairs was locked. I could go up there, but I had to come back down. I don’t know why, maybe because his room was there. I think there were a lot of conversations going on about what to do with the upstairs to keep it preserved, but Vernon and my mom decided I wasn’t allowed back into my room.

I realized in that moment that all of these phrases I use, and the things I say to my daughter, are the ways my mom spoke to me. She had gotten them directly from her dad. From the South. And all of them are alive in me. I can hear her saying, “Get over here, goddamn it, and give me some sugar!” She mothers my daughter through me. Whenever I go to the South and hear the Memphis accent, I feel a longing, a nostalgia for something I never lived. I’ve never lived in Memphis. But something inside of me has.

I was four when they split up. But I remained so close with my dad. I knew how much I was adored, how much he loved me. I knew that he knew that I hated, hated, hated leaving him. Hated, hated, hated going to my mother’s new home

I was four when they split up. But I remained so close with my dad. I knew how much I was adored, how much he loved me. I knew that he knew that I hated, hated, hated leaving him. Hated, hated, hated going to my mother’s new home in Los Angeles. Loathed it. He got a house there to be closer to me.

You could always sense my dad’s intensity. If it was a good intensity, it was incredible; if it was bad, watch the fuck out. Step back. He had this magnetism about him. Whatever it was going to be, it was going to be a thousand percent. And when he got angry, everybody would run, duck, and take cover.

My dad loved to have fun and he loved everybody else to have fun with him, and he loved to laugh. He was very gregarious in that way: He didn’t do it to have an entourage follow him. He was generous because he wanted everyone else to enjoy everything.

He had a little plaque on the wall up there with a poem that always broke my heart. It’s titled “Why God Made Little Girls”: God made the world with its towering trees Majestic mountains and restless seas Then paused, and said, “It needs one more thing, Someone to laugh and dance and sing To walk in the woods and gather flowers, To commune with nature in the quiet hours.” So God made little girls, With laughing eyes and bouncing curls, With joyful hearts and infectious smiles Enchanting ways and feminine wiles And when He’d completed the task He’d begun, He was pleased and proud of the job He’d done For the world when seen through a little girl’s eyes Greatly resembles Paradise.

When you saw the underlines and the spiritual searching, you got a sense of the fundamentally broken feeling he shared with my mom. He was searching to fix himself, searching for a deeper meaning, something she would then search for in her own life, too. So often we’d sit up there, and my mom would go line by line, really reading into everything he had underlined, showing us, grasping at straws.

You can still feel him in that room. His spirit is imprinted there. I have a vague memory of this one conversation we had in that room about a passage that Elvis had underlined. I started to call someone to help me remember it, but realized that there’s no one left to call.

I must have been around twenty years old this particular year, and I watched as an older fan, one clearly from Elvis’s generation, hugged my mom. That fan was there every year, so I recognized her, but this time I was really watching their interaction; I became keenly aware of my mom’s body language in a different way, I guess because I was older. And the way that my mom surrendered to this woman’s arms broke my heart. In that moment I saw so clearly that she was searching for a parent.

I was supposed to go back to L.A. because I was about to start school. “Please, ask Mommy if she’ll let me stay,” I begged my dad. “I’ll call her and ask her,” he said, and told me to go wait in my room. I remember pacing outside his doors, in that hallway with the foot-long shag rug. Eventually he came out and hugged me. I heard this kind of wheezing sound. He was crying. “You can’t stay,” he said, “she wants you to come home.

My mother told me that she’d thought about trying to fall off her horse to cause a miscarriage. She didn’t want to gain pregnancy weight. She thought that wouldn’t be a good look for her as Elvis’s wife. There were so many women after him, all of them beautiful. She wanted his undivided attention. She was so upset that she was pregnant that initially she’d only eat apples and eggs and never gained much weight. I was a pain in her ass immediately and I always felt she didn’t want me. I believe in energy in utero, so maybe I already felt her vibe of trying to get rid of me. Eventually she just kind of decided to keep me, but at the time, she didn’t have great maternal instincts. That might be what’s wrong with me.