Words matter. These are the best Liz Murray Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My mother used to sit at the foot of my bed, and she would share her dreams with me.
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.
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.’
I thought, ‘Let’s make it a check list. What if I got my education even though I lost my mother, even though my dad is in a shelter?’ and looking at these things as hurdles to go over. I could inspire myself.
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’d been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends’ houses, sometimes in the subway.
People are surprised by the poverty and think that I wasn’t cared for. But that wasn’t the case – I was deeply loved.
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.
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.
When you take charge of your own narrative, it gives you a handle on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
