Top 250 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “All of this fantasy is an act of supreme optimism, or, if you’re feeling less charitable, arrogance.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

153. “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

154. “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

155. “You tell her she has to go to therapy or else you’re going to leave her. Sullen, she agrees. She does go, for a while. The first.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

184. “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

185. “I felt like a calculator with someone’s finger over the solar panel – fading in and out, threatening to shut off altogether.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

187. “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

188. “Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

189. “Clarity is an intoxicating drug.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

190. “A feeling settles over me – a one-beer-deep feeling, a no-more-skittering-feet-after-the-trap-snaps feeling.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

192. “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

193. “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

194. “Not all of us can deal with the illumination that comes with justice.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

195. “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

196. “When we die, our bodies will be scattered in the heavens as two constellations... And no one will have known happiness like ours.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

197. “You feel like you can jump from one idea to the next, searching for a kind of aggregate meaning. You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will be able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before. There is so much to be gained from inverting the gestalt.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

198. “When other teenagers were figuring out what good and bad relationships looked like, I was busy being extremely weird:.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

199. “Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

200. “What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives.”

— Carmen Maria Machado