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

152. “The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. – Sarah Manguso.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

154. “Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

155. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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 enought that you be given money to work on it.” He gestured to the hotel around us. “It demands that what you say is important enough that it be published or shown to the world.”

— 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. “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

164. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

169. “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

170. “Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

171. “He wishes they were still floating safely in the unborn space, which he imagines to be grayish-blue, like the Atlantic, studded with star-like points of light, and thick as corn syrup.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

172. “It is an awful thing, that missing symbol. Folks know. Folks can pick up on words of rock. Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

189. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “Fear makes liars of us all.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

195. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

197. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— 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