Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Around us, minutes inch over the dirt like ants, tumble into the swollen stream, are carried away.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

102. “The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you. Or perhaps the moral is that brides never fare well in stories, and one should avoid either being a bride, or being in a story. After all, stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

103. “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

104. “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

105. “It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions, that if you return somewhere often enough, it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider, that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

106. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

108. “Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

109. “It gives him delight in a way that houses no wanting, and this pleases me.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

110. “There is also the simple yet terrible fact that the legal system does not provide protection against most kinds of abuse- verbal, emotional, psychological- and even worse, it does not provide context. It does not allow certain kinds of victims in.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

117. “Stabler and his wife dance all over the house, mouse masks on their faces. The kids stare at the scene in horror, and run to their room, where one is busy forgetting and the other is remembering what will, one day, be a chapter in her well-received memoir.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

124. “I had no self-control, but tomorrow I would relinquish control and everything would be right again.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

125. “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

126. “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

127. “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,′ I said. ‘It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

128. “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

129. “What if you get inside and there’s nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

130. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

146. “You admit to her that you are constantly nursing low-grade crushes on many people in your life. Nothing acted on, just that you find many people attractive and do your best to surround yourself with smart, funny minds, and the result is a gooey, lovely space somewhere between philia and eros.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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