Maggie Smith Keep Moving Quotes

Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.

When life held your hand in the flames, it taught you something about the kind of burning you can endure. You survived: don’t forget that, and don’t diminish it. KEEP MOVING.

It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are.

Accept that you are a work in progress, both a revision and a draft: you are better and more complete than earlier versions of yourself, but you also have work to do. Be open to change. Allow yourself to be revised.

Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it's inside them, out of reach.

Don't wait for your life to magically come together--it's your work to do. Every day, every moment, you are making your life from scratch. Today, take one step, however small, toward creating a life you can be proud of.

Start making yourself at home in your life as it is.

Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.

Recognize the difference between The End and An End.

Give the present the gift of your full attention.

Close the gap between yourself and your spirit--the person you know you can be. Let your choices reflect the person you want to become, not just the person you think you are.

Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead. A woman whose husband dies is a widow. But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person—a child, a partner, an estranged family member or dear friend. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but you go on living. There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.

What is embarrassment but a relative of fear? You've been seen—caught—at being imperfect.

Your work is being yourself, offering what you can to others. You’ve been doing it all along. Now do it with intention.

Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling--love, anger, gratitude, grief--it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.

Do not be ashamed of the intensity of your emotion. That's your humanity. Grief can be feral, wild, frightening. Give it a safe place to live.

Speak without silencing others. Listen without losing your own voice. KEEP MOVING.

You don’t have to be in love to have love in your life. Take stock of everything—and everyone—that fills your heart.

A silver lining of being alone is being with someone you can trust, someone you respect and understand. You can let your guard down when you're by yourself. You can give yourself permission to live your authentic life, without apology. You can love yourself in a way that no one else can.

Do not be led by fear; fear cannot lead you out of the dark. Find whatever bits of hope you can--a trail of even the smallest bread crumbs, even the tiniest pebbles reflecting the moonlight--and follow them.

Fight the urge to withdraw, to fold in on yourself, as if your pain is contagious and might infect someone else. We are here to take care of one another; the care is what's catching, spreading person to person to person. So take--and give--care.

Being strong, bracing yourself against hurt, can get in the way of actual healing; the real work.

It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are. Be wary of those who don't want you to change or grow. Grow anyway--there is no alternative.

Stop focusing on what is behind you. It's growing smaller and smaller, miniaturizing in the distance; stop squinting at it, as if it has answers. Today, keep your eyes on where you are going, not where you have been.

If you’re not careful, you can revise the life right out of a piece of writing. If you’re not careful, you can scrub all the weirdness and wildness right out of it. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can polish it dull.

You are not betraying your grief by feeling joy. You are not being graded, and you do not receive extra credit for being miserable 100% of the time. Find pockets of relief, even happiness, when and where you can. KEEP MOVING.

Accept that you may never get to know what it means. Accept that there may not be a reason, despite the comfort that reasons provide. Don't look for meaning in whatever collapsed around you; make meaning by digging yourself out.

Remember a time when you forgave someone, how freeing that felt. You deserve your mercy as much as anyone else does. Forgive yourself for something today, something you wish you’d done differently. Just let it go. Free yourself from it.

Commit yourself to the present. Loosen your grip on the life you had before—before a loss, an upheaval, a change that called everything into question—so that you can be here, where you’re needed, right now. KEEP MOVING. Do something today that will bring you joy even if you know you will not do it well.

Let the hard days be hard. When you mourn a person, it’s a form of love. You mourn their loss because they mattered, because the world without them is diminished. Sit still with your grief if you need to, then lift it and carry it with you. KEEP MOVING. Take stock of what you can see in your life now that parts of it are gone: What view has that space created?

Think of what you’ve achieved that didn’t seem possible last year, or five years ago, or ten; it didn’t seem possible then but you’ve proven that it was. Now imagine what might be possible in another year or five or ten. KEEP MOVING. Ask yourself what you would do if you had an unlimited supply of both courage and hope. Now begin answering that question with action. Take one step today—then repeat, repeat, repeat.

How I picture it: A scar is a story about pain, injury, healing. Years, too, are scars we wear. I remember their stories. The year everything changed. Kindergarten, fourth grade. The year of the pinecone, the postcard, the notebook. The year of waking in the night, sweating, heart racing. The year of being the only adult in the house, one baseball bat by the front door and another one under the bed. Or the year the divorce was finalized. First grade, fifth grade. Two houses, two beds, two Christmases, two birthdays. The year of where are your rain boots, they must be at Dad’s house. The year of who signed the permission slip? The year of learning to mow the lawn. The year of fixing the lawn mower, unclogging the toilets. The year I was tattooed with lemons. The year of sleeping with the dog instead of a husband. (The dog snores more quietly. The dog takes up less space.) The year of tweeting a note-to-self every day to keep myself moving. The year I kept moving. The year of sitting up at night, forgetting whether the kids were asleep in their beds or not. The year of waking in the morning and having to remember whether they were with me. The year I feared I would lose the house, and the year I did not lose the house. The year I wanted to cut a hole in the air and climb inside, and the year I didn’t want that at all. The year I decided not to disappear. The year I decided not to be small. The year I lived.

Think about the word 'spell', meaning a state of enchantment or a brief period of time. When a chapter of your life ends, you may feel that a spell has been broken. You may feel disenchanted. But new magic is coming. Better yet, make new magic.

Stop watching and watching and watching the rearview mirror. Keep your eyes on the road. See the landscape scroll by like a filmstrip, and don't miss a frame of it. KEEP MOVING.

Everything is temporary. You can't keep a white-knuckled hold on what you love or on what has hurt you. Loosen your grip on your grief today, if only a bit.

KEEP MOVING. Ask yourself what part of you is holding on to pain because it is familiar, because letting go would require you to do something different, to fill that space. And what could fill that space? Today, loosen your grip on the pain. Let it go, bit by bit. KEEP MOVING. It took us years to decide to have another child.

Expect that what you tend to will grow. Expect that what you feed with your care and attention, what you shine your light on, will thrive. Choose wisely. KEEP MOVING.

When life held your hand in the flames, it taught you something about the kind of burning you can endure. You survived; don't forget that, and don't diminish it.

Do not hold yourself to some impossible standard. The word amateur comes from the Latin Amare, meaning "to love." Let yourself be a beginner, an amateur–someone who is learning to live a new life, someone who loves it for its potential.

Do not be still by anger or grief. Burn them both, and use that fuel to keep moving.

Think about Pluto—how it continues to exist as itself, as always, oblivious to human categories. Remember that no one else gets to define you or determine your worth. Be a planet despite what they may call you. Keep moving.

have no idea what the next twenty years of my life will look like, only that they won’t—can’t—look like the last twenty years. That forest has burned. And yet. And yet!