Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

152. “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

153. “Most importantly,” my father said, arriving triumphantly at his final piece of evidence, “why did no one notice the toes except for you?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

154. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

164. “You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself – not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

165. “I do not even struggle to speak. The spark of words dies so deep in my chest, there is not even space to mount them on an exhale.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

166. “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

167. “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

168. “Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

171. “When the baby cries, she could be hungry or thirsty or angry or cranky or sick or sleepy or paranoid or jealous or she had planned something but it went horribly awry. So you’ll need to take care of that, when it happens.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

173. “It were as if I were a minor character in someone else’s play, and the plot required me to stay there at that moment, no matter how I resisted. Perhaps that is what caused my grief.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

174. “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

175. “You have never been a pot person – you have, in fact, been a bit of a ninny when it comes to drugs; when you even say the word drugs you feel ridiculous – but you smoke because she does and she’ll be annoyed if you don’t.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

176. “You did not believe this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

177. “Fear makes liars of us all.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

178. “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

179. “I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

181. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

186. “In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

187. “And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

189. “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

190. “You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, ‘If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love’? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

196. “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

197. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

199. “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

200. “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