Top 250 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “The lack of color is to show off the dresses. It terrifies our patrons into an existential crisis and then, a purchase. This is what Gizzy tells me, anyway. “The black,” she says, “reminds us that we are mortal and that youth is fleeting. Also, nothing makes pink taffeta pop like a dark void.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

202. “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

203. “You have always adored driving great distances across your country; it is the only time you ever feel any kind of patriotism.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

204. “You are not a parent; no one has ever told you that they hated you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “Sometimes stories are destroyed and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

211. “And what is through the forest?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

212. “You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “You were not always just a You. I was whole – a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts – and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person – that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer – away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

222. “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

223. “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

224. “There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t –.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

226. “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

227. “How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you?”

— Carmen Maria Machado

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “I always thought the expression “safe as houses” meant that houses were safe places.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

232. “Was this friendship? Was this how things were supposed to be? It felt that way, that I had ecstatically stumbled into happiness, and everything seemed right and correct.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

234. “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

235. “You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

237. “You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “The forgiveness tastes sweeter than any candy that can be given at any door. When he climbs into my lap, I sing to him until he falls asleep.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

245. “There is so much to be gained from inverting the gestalt. Back up, cross your eyes. Something is there.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

246. “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

247. “He doesn’t lock her in her room or in the house. He doesn’t have to. He turns her mind into a prison.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

248. “I’m having a crisis of function.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

249. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado