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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

113. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

115. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

120. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

123. “Fear makes liars of us all.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

140. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “You were young. You didn’t know that your mind could be a boon and a prison both. That someone could take its power, and turn it against you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

148. “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

149. “When it was humid, the front door swelled in its frame and refused to open, like a punched eye.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

150. “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