Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

54. “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

55. “The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

56. “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

57. “The Gothic heroine tries to convince herself that her suspicions are unfounded, that, since she loves him, he must be trustworthy and that she will have failed as a woman if she does not implicitly believe in him.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

58. “She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood – a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

59. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

61. “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. – Zora Neale Hurston.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

62. “What if you get inside and there’s nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

63. “I felt like she was seared into my time line, unchangeable as Pompeii.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

64. “When it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me – a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet – was detailed in books and reports, in statistics. It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

65. “Love cannot be won or lost, a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

66. “BAD BLOOD”: Stabler and Benson will never forget the case where solving the crime was so much worse than the crime itself.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

67. “I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

68. “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

69. “A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

70. “Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

71. “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

72. “Afterward, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she wanted to live. As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

73. “Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make. “Life is too short to be afraid of nothing,” she said, “and I will show you.” Pride is the second mistake.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

74. “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

75. “What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

76. “Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

77. “Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

78. “It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions, that if you return somewhere often enough, it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider, that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

79. “When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

80. “But this story? This one’s mine.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

81. “You have always been interested in demon and possession narratives, no matter how cheesy or silly they are. It’s the perfect intersection of your morbid curiosities and the remnants of your religious upbringing; a reminder of a time when you believed in that sort of thing.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

82. “My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

83. “And there was nothing in my eyes. Or even worse – nothingness. Not the presence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

84. “That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

85. “You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

86. “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 essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

87. “Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

88. “Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

89. “What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

90. “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

91. “She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. 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. Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

92. “We are reminded that we are alive, we love each other all of the time and like each other most of the time, and that women can turn children into this world like breathing.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

93. “We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated.50 Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

94. “I wished I had always lived in this body, and you could have lived here with me, and I could have told you it’s all right, it’s going to be all right.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

95. “You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me. Go to page 171.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

96. “I just want to get an apartment and turn my own little doorknob and use my own bathroom and eat my own food.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

97. “The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you. Or perhaps the moral is that brides never fare well in stories, and one should avoid either being a bride, or being in a story. After all, stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

98. “As my lopped head tips backward off my neck and rolls off the bed, I feel as lonely as I have ever been.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

99. “None of us will make it to the end.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

100. “I learned: they never see the glass coming. They only see the reflection of the sky.”

— Carmen Maria Machado