Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Fear makes liars of us all.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

112. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

114. “Evil is a powerful word. You use it once, and it tastes bad: metallic, false. But what other word can you use for a person who makes you feel so powerless.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

115. “And as the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you’re going to tell someone how bad it is, you’re gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

117. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

130. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

132. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

135. “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

136. “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

137. “We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

138. “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

139. “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

140. “What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

141. “I called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. When she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and I let her step inside.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

149. “Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what – not who – you are.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado