Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

209. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

221. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

225. “Clarity is an intoxicating drug.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

226. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

228. “A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

229. “Her hair grayed at the temples and the way she laughed tripped pleasure down the stairs of my heart.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

237. “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

238. “You could go to bed too. Or, you could sit at the table in the kitchen and watch the scene from behind the windowpane. But that, you think, would be like putting this night in a museum – removed, too-soon forgotten. Sit with this, you think. Don’t forget this is happening. Tomorrow, you will probably push this away. But here, remember.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

242. “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