Top 250 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “It is emerging, like the lie of snow withdrawing from the truth of the landscape.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

155. “My memory has something to say about the way trauma has altered my body’s DNA, like an ancient virus.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

156. “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

157. “At eight I was reed-thin, anxious. I was too tightly wound to be dreamy, most of the time, but sitting in the grass gave me a kind of peace.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

158. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

173. “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

174. “The first ten minutes of the day, I’m not responsible for anything I say.” This struck you as poetic. You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

179. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

181. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

186. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

190. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— 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. “It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part. Thinking you can say what you want as you want to, but with a singular constraint.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado