Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

57. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Maybe this will change someday. Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

62. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

67. “By the time I got around to dating people I was a little desperate, a little horny, and a lot confused. I had figured out exactly nothing. 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

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

— 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. “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

71. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

86. “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

87. “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

88. “Did any of them make you feel complicit in your own suffering?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

89. “At eight I was reed-thin, anxious. I was too tightly wound to be dreamy, most of the time, but sitting in the grass gave me a kind of peace.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

91. “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

92. “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

93. “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

94. “In the morning, the woman who made you ill with fear brews a pot of coffee and jokes with you and kisses you and sweetly scratches your scalp like nothing has happened. And, as though you’d slept, a new day begins again.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

95. “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

96. “If you could harness that energy – that constant, roving hunger – you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

97. “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

98. “I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and to suffer greatly.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

99. “She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

100. “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