Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Autumn was the worst time to go into the mountains, I thought to myself. To drive into the wilderness when it writhed and gasped for air seemed foolish.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

60. “It is not an extraordinary thing to claim that some people are more valuable than others to the world.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

61. “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

62. “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

63. “It is emerging, like the lie of snow withdrawing from the truth of the landscape.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

64. “I was a virgin. When he took me, I popped.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

65. “This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

66. “This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

70. “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

71. “A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

73. “And haven’t men been gaslighting women, abusing their lovers, harassing their girlfriends, murdering their wives for as long as human history has existed? And isn’t their violence always a footnote, an acceptable causality?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

74. “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

75. “Around us, minutes inch over the dirt like ants, tumble into the swollen stream, are carried away.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

76. “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

77. “One day, a bird slammed into my studio window. I was sitting on a yoga ball and tumbled backward in terror. Almost every residency I’ve had since, I’ve found at least one stunned bird sprawled on the ground outside my workspace. I learned: they never see the glass coming. They only see the reflection of the sky.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

78. “What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it? What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

79. “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

80. “I feel so good,′ they all said. Whenever I talked to them, that was what always came out of their mouths, or really, it was a mouth, a single mouth that once ate and now just says, ‘I feel really, really good.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

85. “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

86. “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

87. “No one knows what causes it. It’s not passed in the air. It’s not sexually transmitted. It’s not a virus or a bacteria, or if it is, it’s nothing scientists have been able to find. At first everyone blamed the fashion industry, then the millennials, and, finally, the water. But the water’s been tested, the millennials aren’t the only ones going incorporeal, and it doesn’t do the fashion industry any good to have women fading away. You can’t put clothes on air. Not that they haven’t tried.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

88. “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

89. “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

90. “It gives him delight in a way that houses no wanting, and this pleases me.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

91. “And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

92. “Sometimes I wonder if the bars make the monsters and not the other way around.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

93. “People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

94. “Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what – not who – you are. The story always looks a little different, depending on who is telling it.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

95. “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

96. “I’ve wanted you since the first time I met you.” Benson leans forward and kisses her. The heartbeat is a hunger. She pulls her inside.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

97. “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

98. “I want to say, Don’t bother asking me anything. I want to say, There is nothing underneath.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

99. “Stabler and his wife dance all over the house, mouse masks on their faces. The kids stare at the scene in horror, and run to their room, where one is busy forgetting and the other is remembering what will, one day, be a chapter in her well-received memoir.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

100. “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