Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life.”

— Chanel Miller

2. “When society questions a victim’s reluctance to report, I will be here to remind you that you ask us to sacrifice our sanity to fight outdated structures that were designed to keep us down.”

— Chanel Miller

3. “I decide what I am capable of.”

— Chanel Miller

4. “Little girls don’t stay little forever, Kyle Stephens said. They turn into strong women who return to destroy your world.”

— Chanel Miller

5. “We don’t fight for our own happy endings. We fight to say you can’t. We fight for accountability. We fight to establish precedent. We fight because we pray we’ll be the last ones to feel this kind of pain.”

— Chanel Miller

6. “It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do.”

— Chanel Miller

7. “You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do.”

— Chanel Miller

8. “This book does not have a happy ending. The happy part is there is no ending, because I’ll always find a way to keep going.”

— Chanel Miller

9. “Erasure is a form of oppression, the refusal to see.”

— Chanel Miller

10. “I am a victim, I have no qualms with this word, only with the idea that it is all that I am.”

— Chanel Miller

11. “I didn’t know that being a victim was synonymous with not being believed.”

— Chanel Miller

12. “The barricades that held us down will not work anymore. And when silence and shame are gone, there will be nothing to stop us. We will not stand by as our mouths are covered, bodies entered. We will speak, we will speak, we will speak.”

— Chanel Miller

13. “He had not been aware of my one rule: I decide what I am capable of. Whenever I am underestimated, I think, you mistake my quietness for weakness. If you can’t imagine me on a stage, I’ll get on one.”

— Chanel Miller

14. “Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power.”

— Chanel Miller

15. “I learned the divide between unthinkable violence and ordinary life was paper thin.”

— Chanel Miller

16. “From grief, confidence has grown, remembering what I have endured. From anger, stemmed purpose. To tuck them away would mean to neglect the most valuable tools this experience has given me.”

— Chanel Miller

17. “I was reminded that having extra needs does not make you too difficult, too time consuming, but worthy of compassion and love.”

— Chanel Miller

18. “What was unique about this crime, was that the perpetrator could suggest the victim experienced pleasure and people wouldn’t bat an eye. There’s no such thing as a good stabbing or bad stabbing, consensual murder or nonconsensual murder.”

— Chanel Miller

19. “He had not been aware of my one rule – I decide what I am capable of.”

— Chanel Miller

20. “We force her to think hard about what this will mean for his life, even though he never considered what his actions would do to her.”

— Chanel Miller

21. “Victims are often, automatically, accused of lying. But when a perpetrator is exposed of lying, the stigma doesn’t stick. Why is it that we’re wary of victims making false accusations, but rarely consider how many men have blatantly lied about, downplayed, or manipulated others to cover their own actons?”

— Chanel Miller

22. “Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That’s the terrifying part.”

— Chanel Miller

23. “When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions people ask is, Did you say no? This question assumes that the answer was always yes, and that it is her job to revoke the agreement. To defuse the bomb she was given. But why are they allowed to touch us until we physically fight them off? Why is the door open until we have to slam it shut?”

— Chanel Miller

24. “The judge had given Brock something that would never be extended to me: empathy. My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”

— Chanel Miller

25. “Allow that you are at this moment not in the wrong place in your life. Consider the possibility that there have been no errors in the game. Just consider it. Consider that there is not an error, and everything that’s come down on your plate is the way it is and here we are.”

— Chanel Miller

26. “In fact I need you to know it was all true. The friendly guy who helps you move and assists senior citizens in the pool is the same guy who assaulted me. One person can be capable of both. Society often fails to wrap its head around the fact that these truths often coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That’s the terrifying part.”

— Chanel Miller

27. “I didn’t know that money could make the cell doors swing open. I didn’t know that if a woman was drunk when the violence occurred, she wouldn’t be taken seriously. I didn’t know that if he was drunk when the violence occurred, people would offer him sympathy. I didn’t know that my loss of memory would become his opportunity. I didn’t know that being a victim was synonymous with not being believed.”

— Chanel Miller

28. “Most of us understand that your future is not promised to you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make. Your future is earned, little by little, through hard work and action. If you don’t act accordingly, that dream dissolves.”

— Chanel Miller

29. “My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”

— Chanel Miller

30. “They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability.”

— Chanel Miller

31. “When I listened to her, I understood: You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do. I had to believe her, because she was living proof. Then she said, Good and bad things come from the universe holding hands. Wait for the good to come.”

— Chanel Miller

32. “I did not come into existence when he harmed me. She found her voice! I had a voice, he stripped it, left me groping around blind for a bit, but I always had it. I just used it like I never had to use it before. I do not owe him my success, becoming, he did not create me. The only credit Brock can take is for assaulting me, and he could never even admit to that.”

— Chanel Miller

33. “I used to shrink at harsh tones, used to be afraid. Until I learned it takes nothing to be hostile. Nothing. It is easy to be the one yelling, chucking words that burn like coals, neon red, meant to harm. I have learned I am water. The coals sizzle, extinguishing when they reach me. I see how, those fiery coals are just black stones, sinking to the bottom.”

— Chanel Miller

34. “Most people say developing is linear, but for survivors it is cyclic. People grow up, victims grow around; we strengthen around the place that hurt, become older and fuller, but the vulnerable core is never gone.”

— Chanel Miller

35. “And finally, to girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought everyday for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you.”

— Chanel Miller

36. “No matter how awful and long your journey, I can promise you the turn. One day it will lift.”

— Chanel Miller

37. “You are allowed to be cautious but you don’t always have to be afraid.”

— Chanel Miller

38. “For so long I believed I needed permission to return to my life, waiting for validation. I promised myself I would never question whether I deserved better. The answer would always be yes and yes and yes.”

— Chanel Miller

39. “But it bothered me that having a boyfriend and being assaulted should be related, as if I, alone, was not enough... It should have been enough to say, I did not want a stranger touching my body.”

— Chanel Miller

40. “Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s.”

— Chanel Miller

41. “Up until then I’d envisioned a limitless future. Now the lights went out, and two narrow corridors lit up. You can walk down the one where you attempt to forget and move on. Or you walk down the corridor that leads back to him. There is no right choice; both are long and difficult and take indefinite amounts of time. I was still running my hands along the walls looking for a third door, to a corridor where this never happened, where I could continue the life I had planned.”

— Chanel Miller

42. “I am not a burden. I am not limited, I am ever expanding. Your suffering means something. You are worth more than three months. They could never truly have rejected me since they had never fully known me. You are worth more than three months. The assault was never all of me.”

— Chanel Miller

43. “Pain, when examined closely, became clarity... He believed he could break us, but from this day forward, I would begin to build.”

— Chanel Miller

44. “Privilege accompanies the light skinned, helped maintained his belief that consequences did not apply to him. In this system who is untouchable, who is disposable, whose lives are we intent on preserving, who goes unaccounted for, who is the true disrupter, the one firing, the one fingering, who created a problem where there never was one?”

— Chanel Miller

45. “Why is it that we’re wary of victims making false accusations, but rarely consider how many men have blatantly lied about, downplayed, or manipulated others to cover their own actions?”

— Chanel Miller

46. “The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s.”

— Chanel Miller

47. “How do you come after me, when it is all of us? One of the greatest dangers of victimhood is the singling out; all of your attributes and anecdotes assigned blame. In court they’ll try to make you believe you are unlike the others, you are different, an exception. You are dirtier, more stupid, more promiscuous. But it’s a trick. The assault is never personal, the blaming is.”

— Chanel Miller

48. “She said to the women, Leave your pain here and go out and do your magnificent things. I didn’t know instructions like this were possible.”

— Chanel Miller

49. “But living is an incredible thing, just to have been here, to have felt, if only briefly, the volume and depth of others’ empathy. I wrote, most of all, to tell you I have seen how good the world can be.”

— Chanel Miller

50. “There is a certain carefree feeling that was stripped from me the night of the assault. How to distinguish spontaneity from recklessness? How to prove nudity is not synonymous with promiscuity? Where’s the line between caution and paranoia? This is what I’m mourning, this is what I do not know how to get back.”

— Chanel Miller