Liz Murray

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Your potential in this world is timeless”

“I realized that I had the ability to carve out a life for myself, that it was in no way limited by what had already occurred in my past. And that inspired me to go to school.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 guess more than anything, I just realized, okay, one day I had a home to live in and my family around me. The next day, I did not.”

“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.”

“When you take charge of your own narrative, it gives you a handle on it.”

“I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.”