Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

103. “So many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely – within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too. But my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do. They can still climb onto the witness stand.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

104. “In the bathroom, a mirror flecked with mascara from when Bad leans in close, the amoeba of her breath growing and shrinking. You never live with a woman, you live inside of her, I overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

105. “But without ego,” Diego said, “your writing is just scribbles in a journal. Your art is just doodles. Ego demands that what you do is important enough that you be given money to work on it.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

106. “No, Novikov’s time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

107. “Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

108. “I will look where her eyes would be. I will open my mouth to ask but then realize the question has answered itself: by loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal. She will outlive me by a hundred million years; more, even. She will outlive my daughter, and my daughter’s daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind, their inscrutable forms and unknowable destinies.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

109. “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

110. “I dip my foot into the water. There is a second of brilliant heat that slides straight through me, like steel wire through a block of wet clay. I gasp but do not pause. A second foot, less pain. Hands on the sides of the bathtub, I lower myself down. The water hurts, and it is good. The chemicals in the bubble bath burn, and that is better.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

111. “The sixty-fifth story,” Henson whispers into her ear, “is about a world that watches you and me and everyone. Watches our suffering like it is a game. Can’t stop. Can’t tear themselves away. If they could stop, we could stop, but they won’t, so we can’t.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

112. “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

113. “If there were any justice in the world, this oyster would grab hold of my tongue and choke me dead.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

114. “The Milky Way was stunningly clear; starmatter smeared across the black.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

116. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

120. “Your scary aunt said, apropos of nothing, “I don’t believe in gay people,” and from the back seat – empowered by adulthood – you said, “Well, we believe in you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

121. “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

122. “Snowdrifts turning the nuances of nature into bumps, reminding us to keep perspective, reminding us that everything has a season, reminding us that time passes and so will we, one day.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

123. “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

124. “Why do we teach girls their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these word. After all, melodrama comes from melos, which means music, honey. A drama queen is nonetheless a queen.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

125. “I took a step toward her. ‘It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,’ I said.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

126. “As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

127. “I am always surprised at the poetry with which boys can describe boning.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

128. “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

129. “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

130. “This is how emotions work, right? They get tangled and complicated? They take on their own life? Trying to control them is like trying to control a wild animal: no matter how much you think you’ve taught them, they’re willful. They have minds of their own. That’s the beauty of wildness.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

131. “The past never leaves us; there’s always atmosphere to consider; you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh. In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

132. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

134. “Bodies are terrifying; they’re powerful and fragile, bloody and imperfect, uncanny, impressionable vehicles that carry our minds from birth until death. And of course they’re inherently haunted. Haunting is a kind of impression; a lingering effect from a physical act like a shoeprint or a cloud of perfume left in the air. In the same way, bodies carry trauma and choices of our ancestors. Our DNAs are blueprints of the past.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

135. “The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. – Sarah Manguso.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

136. “My body radiates pain, is dense with it.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

138. “The car is going so fast that you feel wild, you feel like you could die right now and it would be thrilling. You realize you are laughing, and he goes even faster.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

139. “The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

140. “Brides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

141. “I realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

142. “And then autumn, the first autumn, our first autumn, the first squash dish, the sweaters, the burning smell of the space heater, never leaving the heavy blankets, the scent of smoke that reminds me of being a Girl Scout and being twelve and camping with girls who hate me.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

143. “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

144. “You are a piece of someone’s destiny. You are critical to a larger plan that will span many years, many kingdoms, many volumes.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

145. “SELFISH”: The medical examiner can’t bring herself to admit that sometimes, she’s the one who wants to be cut open, to have someone tell her all of her own secrets.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

146. “Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these words- after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen- but they are still hot to the touch. 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

147. “He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

148. “Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

149. “He wishes they were still floating safely in the unborn space, which he imagines to be grayish-blue, like the Atlantic, studded with star-like points of light, and thick as corn syrup.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

150. “It is an awful thing, that missing symbol. Folks know. Folks can pick up on words of rock. Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin.”

— Carmen Maria Machado