Top 70 Anna-Marie McLemore Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

2. “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

3. “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

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

9. “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

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

16. “The scar on her forearm meant she could never be loyal to her family. Her name meant she could never be loyal to the Corbeaus. The only one left to be loyal to was him.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

22. “He thought the feud was live ash a boot heel could stomp out. He didn’t notice it burning down both their houses.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

23. “Estrella wished she could pry the ground open like the shell of a pomegranate, spilling out its secrets like shining red seeds.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

24. “They say there are as many points of light in the sky as fish in the sea.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

25. “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

26. “He wore his loneliness like his scar.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

27. “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

28. “Page set her hand on the small of my back. She did it like it was only to guide me around rocks or fallen pinecones. But when she did it, I was that glass jar with a candle set inside. The heart of me was as soft as the wax of the tea light.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

29. “I wonder, just for a second, how it will taste on Gael’s tongue, the cinnamon and chile en polvo laced into our vanilla cake, the spice a little like what he adds to his family’s tamales.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

30. “They’re expected to forget everything they knew about being anything other than what they’re supposed to be.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

32. “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

33. “He was beautiful in ways that made him ugly to his family.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

34. “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

35. “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

36. “Then comes another hand. And another one. They come out of the dark like the night is growing them.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

38. “They had both been beaten by men who decided that the only things worth less than their souls were their bodies. Cluck.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

39. “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

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

— Anna-Marie McLemore

41. “My father doesn’t ask why I’m in the back after the first morning rush, making green and purple sugar paste for pan dulce. He’s working on a batch of unicorn conchas, his latest stroke of genius, pan dulce covered with shells of pink, purple, and blue sugar that sell out every weekend.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

42. “He may have known the surface of the moon, memorized the names of the lunar maria, but Miel had done more than that with him. She’d learned him, but left room for the way he was still learning himself. She knew the shape of him, every place that was shadow and every place that reflected light, without deciding he was hers to name.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

43. “My sister and I had been born fair and dark, her looking like a girl in a fairy tale who would grow up sweet, a princess, and me like one who would grow into a cruel witch. I had seen the pictures in storybooks. I knew what I was, with my bloodstained hair. Girls like me were marked for the swans. How could they ever take a girl like Blanca?”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

44. “There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

45. “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

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 was every shade of blue between two midnight’s.”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

48. “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

49. “You two never could follow rules, could you?”

— Anna-Marie McLemore

50. “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