Top 70 Anna-Marie McLemore Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Once you get past the fear of being seen, you can get to the part where you know you’re not alone.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

2. “If you turn yourself into someone everyone can like, you’ll probably end up not liking yourself much. If everyone in the world loves you, then really nobody does.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

3. “Every moment of our life, it goes with us. It lives forever. And a lot of those moments you don’t have much say over. So the ones you do, you’ve got to do everything with them. So that what lives forever is something you want to live with.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

4. “You took the truth and you made it into flowers.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

5. “The difference between baptism and drowning is a few faithless breaths.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

6. “Do not stare at me unless you are willing to see me.′... ‘Look at me,” he says. “Look at this body. My body. Or stop looking. Deny it, and deny me.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

7. “My bad days, they’re part of me. And the things I make, those are part of me too. Especially the things I made during bad days, because they remind me that I still made something out of those bad days.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

8. “Good girls had their own way of hitting back.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

9. “She was a world unknown. She was a place whose darkness held not fear, but the promise of stars.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

10. “Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

11. “When they both realized they were heartbroken enough to want the love torn from their rib cages, they touched each other with their hands and their mouths, and they forgot they wanted to be cured.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

12. “I open the cabinet where there’s a shelf that’s all tea. Every lesbian needs a ridiculous amount of tea, and that goes double for a couple composed of two lesbians, Mom always says. It’s in the manual they gave me when I came out. I can show you.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

13. “There’s a certain way that falling for someone can only ever feel when you’ve fallen at least a little for yourself first.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

14. “The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

15. “There was magic to things that were familiar and ordinary. The way they were known was a kind of enchantment, and when they were gone, the spell broke.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

16. “This is a city where the story they choose to believe about you depends on how well they think of you, and that story can shift as suddenly as the wink of those stars.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

17. “The biggest lie of all is the story you think you already know.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

18. “We’d gotten swept up in the impossible magic of so many hearts being fearlessly themselves.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

19. “We find what is beautiful in what is broken. We find what is heartening in what is terrifying. We find the stars in the woods’ deepest shadows.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

20. “No boy was ever so interesting to them as when he was interesting to someone else.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

21. “My hope for you, reader, for all of us, is two sides of the same wish: that the world gives us each the space to write our own story, and that we leave room for each other’s stories. They are where our hearts survive.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

22. “I would have sworn to a priest that Gatsby’s smile pulled light in through the windows.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

23. “She smelled like halved apples and the new metal of sewing needles and a little like cinnamon.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

24. “I had learned, from a girl with rage-lit eyes and a blue dress, to grasp the blade the world held to me, and hold it myself.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

25. “This is the thing I learned from loving a transgender boy who took years to say his own name: that waiting with someone, existing in that quiet, wondering space with them when they need it, is worth all the words we have in us.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

26. “Boys like us get used to having to lie about everything else just so we can tell the truth about ourselves.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

27. “He thought Kraft Singles contained, within a few inches, all American evils.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

28. “Gatsby looked back at me how any boy in the world would want to be looked at, as though there was such infinite possibility in me, such infinite light, that I was one endless, longest day of the year.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

29. “Because falling in love with a girl who feared nothing in this world had left her ready to love a boy whose heart had been broken before she ever touched him.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

30. “I would find a way to make sure we never had to destroy something of ourselves just to stop other people from taking it. – Rosella.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

31. “Twice as many paths to trouble, their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

32. “Our mother always told us no to tell lies, even to ourselves, because they became truer every time you said them. But we had told ourselves lies, and they had become the truth. We had started to believe that Roja was the sister whose heart was a handful of hard red jewels, and I was the one as insubstantial as the hollow center of a cranberry. The lie of who we were had killed who we might have been. It had buried us. It stripped us down into girls uncomplicated enough to be understood.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

33. “In the dark, my sister glowed, but in the dark, I was the dark itself. Blanca, bright and fair Blanca, was the moon and all its stars. I was just her background to shimmer against.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

34. “Her mother did not guess that water could be more dangerous when there was less of it.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

35. “Even in her nightgown, without her makeup on, Aracely was a slice of color against the window. Her hair was as bright as the fruit of a nectarine. The brown of her skin looked like raw gold stripped from quartz. And she stood tall enough that she looked like she could meet the gaze of the sky out on the horizon.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

36. “That family was el Diablo on earth, with dark wings strapped to their bodies, French on their tongues, a sprinkling of gypsy blood.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

37. “They prickled her like thorns and leaves growing under her skin, and she felt the ache of a glass vine caging her forearm. They would crack, and the jagged pieces would cut into her wrists. Her blood would tint the glass. It would splinter and cut deeper into her.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

38. “I was a girl who would never exist in a fairy tale, not just because of the brown of my body but because of my heart, neither pure enough to be good nor cruel enough to be evil. I was a girl lost in the deep, narrow space between the two forms girls were allowed to take.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

39. “The way he loved her was his, even if she wasn’t.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

40. “Her feeling that the moon had slipped from her grasp seemed locked in a place so far inside her that to reach it would be to break her open.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

41. “A black semiplume, the barbs striped deep red, crossed her palm. She lifted it to her face, and her breath trembled the afterfeather. A perfect copy of the plume still burned into her arm, first a curse, now the only thing she had to prove that he had ever touched her.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

42. “That I was a boy, but it was not as simple as me wanting to be called he. That I liked being called he and him. But that I would’ve liked being called she and her sometimes, too, if it didn’t let everyone settle into the assumption that I was a girl. I had never been a girl, would never be a girl...”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

43. “The way you look at me, do you mean it?”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

44. “This was what turned Nomeolvides girls into women. Not their first times bleeding between their legs, but the first time their hearts broke. Estrella could feel hers inside her rib cage, a bird trapped in an attic.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

45. “Whether the woods knew my name or not, they took me. So I became blackbirds, birch trees, water. I existed as whatever part of the woods would have me, rocks or crows or fallen leaves. I spent time in whatever creek or poison red-and-white mushrooms let me in.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

46. “Of course he would think the whole glittering universe existed to spin anything he wanted out of stardust. He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

47. “She wanted you to have the life you wanted,′ Aracely said. ‘So figure out what kind of life you want.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

48. “The sense of falling did not touch her, not as long as her body was between the hands of this boy who felt steadier in the air than on the ground.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

49. “They would remember only that Miel and Sam had been called Honey and Moon, a girl and a boy woven into the folklore of this place.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

50. “Today i solved a problem my mother knew nothing about,” Estrella said. Her words twisted, each one sounding harder, like a knot tightening. “She still doesn’t. I fixed it, and she had no idea. My mother, all our mothers, they think they’re holding everything up, but we have it too. It’s ours too. So forget what my nother thinks i should or shouldn’t be doing because we’re going and getting some damn cotton candy, okay?”

— Anna-Marie McLemore