Quotes from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“Instead, what I was beginning to understand was that however things unfolded from here on, whatever the next chapter was, my life could never be the sum of one circumstance. It would be determined, as it had always been, by my willingness to put one foot in front of the other, moving forward, come what may.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“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, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“But avoidance allows you to believe that you're making all kinds of strides when you're not.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“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, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“But I know I didn't love school for school's sake. I had never really been what people call an 'academic' person, nor did I see myself becoming one. Instead, I took pleasure in the fact that my work existed in a social setting, one that was based on the promise of a brighter future. I knew that what I adored about school was that each of my assignments - readings, essays, or in-class presentations - was inseparable from my relationships [...] If I loved school at all, I loved it for what it provided me access to: bonds with people I grew to cherish. And nothing was better than working toward my dreams alongside people I loved who were doing the same.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“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, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“Sleeping in a hallway around Bedford Park later that week, I took out my blank transcripts and filled in the grades I wanted, making neat little columns of A’s. If I could picture it—if I could take out these transcripts and look at them—then it was almost as if the A’s had already happened. Day by day, I was just catching up with what was already real. My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“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, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“I was inspired by a question that kept repeating itself in my mind: Could I really change my life? I’d spent so many days, weeks, months, and years thinking about doing things with my life, and now I wanted to know, if I committed to a goal and woke up every single day working hard at it, could I change my life?”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“That’s when I realized that sex was not necessarily a shared thing. Sex was something you do with someone else, yet you can experience it separately from each other. It didn’t necessarily bring you closer. In fact, it could highlight the parts of you that feel most separate. Sex could reveal to you your own isolation. Sam had told me that this act added up to love, but I did not feel loved by Carlos then, nor, in that moment, could I feel my love for him.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“... 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, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“Making these choices [to attend school instead of skipping], as it turned out, wasn't about willpower. I always admired people who “willed” themselves to do something, because I have never felt I was one of them. If sheer will were enough by itself, it would have been enough a long time ago, back on University Avenue, I figured. It wasn't, not for me anyway. Instead, I needed something to motivate me. I needed a few things that I could think about in my moments of weakness that would cause me to throw off the blanket and walk through the front door. More than will, I needed something to inspire me.

One thing that helped was a picture I kept in mind, this image that I used over and over whenever I was faced with these daily choices. I pictured a runner running on a racetrack. The image was set in the summertime and the racetrack was a reddish orange, divided in white racing stripes to flag the runners’ columns. Only, the runner in my mental image did not run alongside others; she ran solo, with no one watching her. And she did not run a free and clear track, she ran one that required her to jump numerous hurdles, which made her break into a heavy sweat under the sun. I used this image every time I thought of things that frustrated me: the heavy books, my crazy sleep schedule, the question of where I would sleep and what I would eat. To overcome these issues I pictured my runner bolting down the track, jumping hurdles toward the finish line.

Hunger, hurdle. Finding sleep, hurdle, schoolwork, hurdle. If I closed my eyes I could see the runner’s back, the movement of her sinewy muscles, glistening with sweat, bounding over the hurdles, one by one. On mornings when I did not want to get out of bed, I saw another hurdle to leap over. This way, obstacles became a natural part of the course, an indication that I was right where I needed to be, running the track, which was entirely different from letting obstacles make me believe I was off it. On a racing track, why wouldn't there be hurdles? With this picture in mind—using the hurdles to leap forward toward my diploma—I shrugged the blanket off, went through the door, and got myself to school.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“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, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“Making these choices, as it turned out, wasn’t about willpower. I always admired people who “willed” themselves to do something, because I have never felt I was one of them. If sheer will were enough by itself, it would have been enough a long time ago, back on University Avenue, I figured. It wasn’t, not for me anyway. Instead, I needed something to motivate me. I needed a few things that I could think about in my moments of weakness that would cause me to throw off the blanket and walk through the front door. More than will, I needed something to inspire me.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“These were the moments when I was most tested, when comfort was an option. Not when I was sleeping in the hallway, not when I had to exit my friends’ apartments forcibly at odd hours, and not even when I had to ride the subway all night long and sleep there. Instead, lying around in my friends’ apartments when I had the option to sleep was the most difficult of all these situations for me. This was because, without being forced outdoors, I somehow had to find a reason to choose school, a reason from inside myself.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“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, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“We would be in each other's lives again. No, he hadn't been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he'd disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“It’s not like we were those homeless people you saw pushing shopping wagons full of sad things like picture frames, electronic parts, and bags of clothing; such obviously broken people that you could guess, just by looking, what it was that bent and broke to get them there. Compared to them we were lucky, without whole lives that needed pushing in carts or carrying in bags that kept busting open and spilling to remind them just what it was they held on to, and why they refused to stop carrying it.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“In this way, compared to some, I could have explained to Carlos, I had it easy. I’d been practicing all my life for this, carrying things. For others it came as a shock. No matter how exhausted we were or what slant he put on our situation, I was only breaking night, fending off the dark until the sun rose each day, when I’d start over, ready and able to do it again.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“The top landing of any Bedford Park building’s stairwell felt so much safer. Lying there, flat on a bed of marble, using my backpack for a pillow, whole lives played out beneath me: the smell of food cooking; lovers’ arguments; dishes clanking; TVs blasting at top volume; my old shows, The Simpsons and Jeopardy!; rap music—all carrying me back to University Avenue. Mostly, though, I heard families: children calling out for mothers, husbands speaking their wives’ names, sending me reminders of the way love stretched between a handful of people fills a space, transforms it into a home.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“All around us, people were cool. By association, so were we.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“I think his paintings are cathartic for him,” she said. “After you experience trauma that deep, you need to do something to heal. Something to make meaning out of all the loss.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“Gene Murry, the box said, underscored by bold letters reading, Head, and Feet, to note the direction. Carlos knew how much that bothered me. With his black marker, he drew a flowing angel on the front of your box, and filled in all the correct information: Jean Marie Murray. August 27, 1954–December 18, 1996. Beloved Mother of Lisa and Elizabeth Murray and Wife of Peter Finnerty.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“The more needy I kept myself, the more it would always be up to other people what happened to me, I decided I would make my life so full of things that empowered me, people like this woman would shrink away, until they disappeared from my sight.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“Things turning around for me had been the result of my focusing on the few areas in life I could change, and surrendering to the knowledge that there were more more things that I just couldn't make different.

I could also choose to carve out a life for myself that was in no way limited by what had already occurred in my past.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“school. If they were wonderful, school was wonderful. It had always been that way for me. And if the teachers believed in me, that was at least the first step in a long journey of believing in myself. This was especially true during my more vulnerable moments, back when I was labeled “truant” and “discipline problem.” I was always seeing myself through the eyes of adults, my parents, caseworkers, psychiatrists, and teachers. If I saw a failure in their eyes, then I was one. And if I saw someone capable, then I was capable. Professional adults had credibility and were my standard for deciding what was legitimate or not, including myself. Previously, when teachers like Ms. Nedgrin saw me as a victim—despite her good intentions—that’s what I believed about myself, too. Now I had teachers at Prep who held me to a higher standard, and that helped me rise to the occasion. If I kept at it, slowly, I could do this. The deeply personal relationships with my teachers in this intimate school setting made me believe it.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“Without a shared living situation to connect us, Daddy, Lisa, ad I spun out of one another's orbits and made independent lives of our own that barely even touched. By the time I finished my first year of high school, the truth was, we barely knew one another.”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”
― Liz Murray, quote from Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

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