Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

153. “You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

154. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

158. “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

159. “I feel as lonely as I have ever been.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

160. “That there’s a real ending to anything is, I’m pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

161. “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

162. “Eventually, everyone forgets. That’s the worst part, maybe.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

163. “Everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she wanted to live.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

176. “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

177. “But keeping going is a way of speaking.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

178. “You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

183. “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

184. “You will spend the next few years of your career coming up with elaborate justifications for the structure of the stories you were writing at the time – telling them to young readers in classrooms and audiences at bookstores; once, to a tenure-track job search committee. You say, “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.” You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

185. “Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day, you will spin around at the water’s edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

186. “She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

187. “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

188. “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

189. “And what is through the forest?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

190. “I wanted my life to be shaken up, to go from being who I was to someone renewed.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

191. “A little girl of ten or eleven, hair in an unraveling braid. It is Mara, old enough to walk, old enough to speak. Old enough to be bullied and then to face the bullies down. Old enough to ask questions without answers and have problems without solutions.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

192. “You secretly want to be a man, not because of any doubts about your gender identity, but because you want people to take you more seriously.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

193. “As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

194. “And isn’t that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

195. “She went to that graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

196. “The nurse shows me how to nurse him, and I am so happy to feel him drink, to touch the curls of his fingers, little commas, each of them.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

197. “I was too tightly wound to be dreamy.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

198. “The moment when you woke up on that couch – before you remembered the phone, remembered your entire life – was one of the sweetest from that year. That tiny pocket of safety and oblivion. Whiskey, breath, bodies. Credits crawling up the dark.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

199. “This baby’s head is bothering me because it’s like a piece of fruit gone bad. I understand that, now, in the middle of this endless desert of sound. It’s like the soft spot on the peach that you can just plunge your thumb into, with no questions asked, with not so much as a how-do-you-do. I’m not going to, but I want to, and the urge is so serious that I put her down.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

200. “I lean into him and I want him. He is solid. He reminds me of a tree – roots that run deep.”

— Carmen Maria Machado