Top 250 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 6

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

102. “Resolve runs out of me. I touch the ribbon. I look at the face of my husband, the beginning and end of his desires all etched there. 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

103. “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

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

— 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 enought that you be given money to work on it.” He gestured to the hotel around us. “It demands that what you say is important enough that it be published or shown to the world.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

110. “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

111. “My queen,′ the letter said, ’your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.”

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive – it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “She’s like dough, how the give of it beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

124. “You could go to bed too. Or, you could sit at the table in the kitchen and watch the scene from behind the windowpane. But that, you think, would be like putting this night in a museum – removed, too-soon forgotten. Sit with this, you think. Don’t forget this is happening. Tomorrow, you will probably push this away. But here, remember.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

125. “All of this fantasy is an act of supreme optimism, or, if you’re feeling less charitable, arrogance.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

126. “I was a creature so small, trapped in some crevice of an indifferent universe.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

127. “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

128. “How do we direct our record keeping toward justice?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

130. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

132. “I think she adored this version of me, whose difficulties were, for all intents and purposes, childlike. She was a good mother for young children.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

133. “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

134. “Fear makes liars of us all.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

135. “I moan and push back, and we rut in that clearing, groans of my pleasure and groans of his good fortune mingling and dissipating into the night. We are learning, he and I.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

136. “Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

140. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

142. “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

143. “It is like him to not understand what there is to be afraid of in this world, but I am still furious.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

145. “You were all mind; anxiety was your lifeblood, your fuel.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

146. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado