Top 200 Carmen Maria Machado Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

207. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “Fear makes liars of us all.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

213. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

215. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

223. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

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

— Carmen Maria Machado

241. “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

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

— Carmen Maria Machado