Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

2. “Please don’t shut me out. Or if you’re going to, just tell me, tell me so that I’m not dangling in this in-between space.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

3. “Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can’t help but respond to that state.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

4. “Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

5. “Every room can be a bedroom: you only need a bed, or not even that. You only need to sleep there. The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

6. “It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

7. “I believe in a world where impossible things happen. Where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and more beautiful. Where love can outdo nature.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

8. “My body is a haunted house that I am lost in. There are no doors but there are knives and a hundred windows. – JACQUI GERMAIN.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

9. “What I want to say: “This almost broke me, but it didn’t. It made me stronger than before. You have made me better. Thank you. I will love you until the end of time.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

10. “A theory about the end of everything: the heat death of the universe. Entropy will take over and matter will scatter and nothing will be anymore.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

11. “You tried to tell your story to people who didn’t know how to listen.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

12. “How many times had you said, “If I just had looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

13. “It’s not that I hate men,” the woman says. “I’m just terrified of them. And I’m okay with that fear.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

14. “Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution of course, is silence. But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

15. “They are talking about how we can’t trust the faded women, women who can’t be touched but can stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

16. “He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt. He is not a bad man at all. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would do a deep disservice to him. And yet –.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

17. “If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

18. “Life is too short to be afraid of nothing,” she said, “and I will show you.” Pride is the second mistake.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

19. “Later, you will learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is “dislocation.” That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new or she’s somewhere where she doesn’t speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

20. “The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

21. “There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

22. “You are more than a body and its accompanying grief.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

23. “I keep thinking I can see the virus blooming on the horizon like a sunrise. I realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

24. “I am captivated by her, there is no other way to put it. There is something easy about her, but not easy the way I was – the way I am. She’s like dough, how the give of it beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential. When I look away from her and then look back, she seems twice as large as before.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

25. “A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it. Dream House as Cycle – Cukor was known to torment his actresses to get “real” performances out of them.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

26. “Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

27. “If your heart is a volcano how shall you expect flowers to bloom in your hands?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

28. “Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

29. “I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

30. “I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

31. “You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself – not your body, not your mind.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

32. “Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

33. “We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

34. “But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

35. “Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

36. “There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, your course, is “silence.” But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

37. “You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room, and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn’t happened yet.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

38. “I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanatorium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

39. “At the end of the world, the park was beautiful, hot. The grass was a little long. The trees were punctuated with birds.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

40. “The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

41. “Every time her hand moves somewhere else, she whispers, “May I?” and the thrill of saying yes, yes, is like the pulsing of the tide over your face, and you would gladly drown that way, giving permission.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

42. “Without the interns to do their nefarious bidding, the gods turn to other tricks.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

43. “The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

44. “Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

45. “He does not move his hand, and as he works himself in me he says, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I do not know if I am the first woman to walk up the aisle of St. George’s with semen leaking down her leg, but I like to imagine that I am.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

46. “I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

47. “Then one day, you learned that rapture could also mean blissful happiness, and you understood, fully, that it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

48. “Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love. – Dorothy Allison.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

49. “Evan the intern was annoying everyone in hell, so the demon sent him back. He overshot his target, though, and accidentally deposited him in Pennsylvania. Evan decides to stay. He never liked New York, anyway. Too expensive. Too sad.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

50. “This, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal.”

— Carmen Maria Machado