Top 60 Chanel Cleeton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People ask how you’re doing, but they don’t really want to know if you’re struggling or not; they want the answer that enables them to go about their day without feeling guilty.”

— Chanel Cleeton

2. “There are natural pauses in conversations when one speaks of family estrangement – the inadequacy of words to convey the unnatural state of breaking from those to whom you are bound in blood, the pauses physically manifesting themselves in an empty chair at an ostentatious dining room table that hailed from Paris. I know all about those pauses – a relationship severed at the knees, a sibling lost to ideology, a family forever fractured.”

— Chanel Cleeton

3. “Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is decide to leave when it is no longer wise to stay.”

— Chanel Cleeton

4. “It’s strange how quickly everything can change. How your life can be on one path, and suddenly, you’re on a completely different one with little to no warning at all, ill-prepared for the challenges ahead.”

— Chanel Cleeton

5. “You can’t live your life to please others if you’re not proud of yourself.”

— Chanel Cleeton

6. “You think you know someone, imagine you know them better than anyone, and then little by little, the fabric of their life unravels before your eyes and you realize how little you knew.”

— Chanel Cleeton

7. “Other guys might have fantasized about porn stars or lingerie models. I fantasized about Fleur Marceaux.”

— Chanel Cleeton

8. “Never forget where you come from. You come from a long line of survivors. Trust in that when things get hard. And in each other.”

— Chanel Cleeton

9. “The day we stop fighting for others is the day we might as well pack it all up and go home.”

— Chanel Cleeton

10. “We are silk and lace, and beneath them we are steel.”

— Chanel Cleeton

11. “That’s the thing about death – even when you think someone is gone, glimpses of them remain in those they loved and left behind.”

— Chanel Cleeton

12. “I want you to be scared. I want things to be messy, and complicated, and difficult. I want you to feel, and I want you to know I’m the one making you feel, that I’m the one making it mean something.”

— Chanel Cleeton

13. “That’s the thing about families. They always tell you the truth, even when you’d almost prefer the lie.”

— Chanel Cleeton

14. “The line between hero and villain is a precariously fragile one.”

— Chanel Cleeton

15. “For many being Cuban is something they carry with them in their hearts, something they fight to preserve even when all they have are their memories. When they left, they couldn’t take anything with them. No photographs, no official documents, no family heirlooms or mementos. That kind of exile makes you angry.”

— Chanel Cleeton

16. “Havana is like a woman who was grand once and has fallen on hard times, and yet hints of her former brilliance remain, traces of an era since passed, a photograph faded by time and circumstance, its edges crumbling to dust.”

— Chanel Cleeton

17. “Kiss me. I want to feel what it’s like to be kissed by a man who wants me,” I whispered. “Please.”

— Chanel Cleeton

18. “I worry I’m surrounded by madmen who desire to burn the world down without thought for the consequences of their actions, without regard for all the innocent lives that will be charred by the flames.”

— Chanel Cleeton

19. “I was caught between two lands – two iterations of myself – the one I inhabited in my body and the one I lived in my dreams.”

— Chanel Cleeton

20. “I’ve always felt that cities have their own character, a personality shaped by their histories and the people that call them home. Barcelona is a city of whispers and secrets.”

— Chanel Cleeton

21. “I wanted to consume her; I wanted to break her and put her back together again, because that’s what I did – I broke things.”

— Chanel Cleeton

22. “I am Cuban, and yet, I am not. I don’t know where I fit here, in the land of my grandparents, attempting to recreate a Cuba that no longer exists in reality. Perhaps we’re the dreamers in all of this. The hopeful ones. Dreaming of a Cuba we cannot see with our eyes, that we cannot touch, whose taste lingers on our palates, with the tang of memory. The exiles are the historians, the memory keepers of a lost Cuba, one that’s nearly forgotten.”

— Chanel Cleeton

23. “If everything happened the way we wished, the way we planned, we’d miss out on the best parts, the unexpected.”

— Chanel Cleeton

24. “People are a mystery, and the second you think you have them figured out, they surprise you.”

— Chanel Cleeton

25. “On good days, I am hopeful. On bad days, I wonder why I bother. But isn’t that the point? They’ve created a system to wear you down so you’re so tired from the weight of it, fighting lines and bureaucracy and the things you need to make it through each day, you don’t have any fight left.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s difficult spreading your message when the government censors certain words in communications.”

— Chanel Cleeton

26. “To be Cuban is to be proud – it is both our greatest gift and our biggest curse. We serve no kings, bow no heads, bear our troubles on our backs as though they are nothing at all. There is an art to this, you see. An art to appearing as though everything is effortless, that your world is a gilded one, when the reality is that your knees beneath your silk gown buckle from the weight of it all. We are silk and lace, and beneath them we are steel.”

— Chanel Cleeton

27. “Dreams never die all at once. They die in pieces, floating a little farther and farther away each day.”

— Chanel Cleeton

28. “I want a little girl with your smile and your smarts. I want Christmases and birthdays and a chocolate Lab who wears an American flag bandana that you name after a political philosopher or something. We can even include him in the family campaign photos.”

— Chanel Cleeton

29. “London was like a drug – an incredible high you never wanted to come off of. It made you feel like you could do anything, be anyone. You could reinvent yourself in a city like this.”

— Chanel Cleeton

30. “Yep, we both put the “fun” in dysfunctional when it came to romance.”

— Chanel Cleeton

31. “Life happens whether you’re worrying about it or not, and it seems presumptuous to think we have much of a say in how things play out.”

— Chanel Cleeton

32. “Terrible things rarely happen all at once,” she answers. “They’re incremental, so people don’t realize how bad things have gotten until it’s too late. He swore up and down that he wasn’t a communist. That he wanted democracy. Some believed him. Others didn’t.”

— Chanel Cleeton

33. “And so occasionally, we do exceedingly foolish things like sneaking out of the house in the dead of night, because it’s impossible to stand near the flame consuming everything around you and not have some of that fire catch the hem of your skirt, too.”

— Chanel Cleeton

34. “Sometimes the bravest thing you could do was admit you’d made a mistake.”

— Chanel Cleeton

35. “The United States isn’t perfect; there’s injustice everywhere I turn. But there’s also a mechanism that protects its citizens – the right to question when something is wrong, to speak out, to protest, to be heard. It doesn’t always work, sometimes the system fails those it was designed to protect, but at least that opportunity – the hope of it – exists.”

— Chanel Cleeton

36. “And so, the beauty of life here – the simplicity of it – is also the tragedy of it.”

— Chanel Cleeton

37. “You never know what’s to come. That’s the beauty of life. If everything happened the way we wished, the way we planned, we’d miss out on the best parts, the unexpected pleasures.”

— Chanel Cleeton

38. “To be Cuban is to be proud – it is both our greatest gift and our biggest curse.”

— Chanel Cleeton

39. “For some, there is only one true love. But not everyone is lucky enough to have that love work out for them. And for some, the love we cannot have is the most powerful one of all.”

— Chanel Cleeton

40. “Is the buying-your-own-drinks thing what you use to give guys the polite brush-off, and now you’re just offering me the seat because you feel sorry for me, or do I actually have a chance here?”

— Chanel Cleeton

41. “She was an indulgence, a dangerous one, but weren’t those the best kind?”

— Chanel Cleeton

42. “She was almost too beautiful. Maybe that sounded stupid, but there wasn’t another way to describe it.”

— Chanel Cleeton

43. “If I’ve learned anything at this point, it’s that life comes down to timing. Things happen the way they are supposed to, the seemingly insignificant moments stringing together to lead you down a path you never imagined traversing, with a man you can’t let go of and you can’t keep.”

— Chanel Cleeton

44. “He looked at me like he was trying to make out all my secrets, and for a girl like me that was a dangerous game to play.”

— Chanel Cleeton

45. “You learn the deepest truths about yourself when you fail at something.”

— Chanel Cleeton

46. “This was what happened when perfect cracked and splintered. This was what happened when your life fell apart.”

— Chanel Cleeton

47. “At the end of the day, the only thing you have left is what you stand for. If I said nothing, if I did nothing, I could not live with myself. I would not be a man. This is the position I choose to take, and for better or worse, I will accept the consequences of my actions.”

— Chanel Cleeton

48. “He was no longer my professor, no longer someone I loathed. He was hands I needed on my body, lips I wanted kissing mine.”

— Chanel Cleeton

49. “If I’m going to have regrets in this life, I’d rather them be for the chances I took and not the opportunities I let slip away.”

— Chanel Cleeton

50. “I hadn’t been looking for trouble, but it seemed that now that I’d found it, I wasn’t running from it, either.”

— Chanel Cleeton