Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Never fight to injure, fight to uplift.”

— Chanel Miller

102. “The slivers we show, the mountains we hide.”

— Chanel Miller

103. “When a victim does go for help, she is seen as attacking the assailant. These are separate; seeking aid is her primary motive, his fallout is a secondary effect. But we are taught, if you speak, something bad happens to him. You.”

— Chanel Miller

104. “On June 5, 2018, the judge was recalled. I remembered a quote from him in the San Francisco Chronicle: Women are frustrated by how they are treated by society, how they are treated by the criminal justice system. That passion is genuine. It needs to be expressed. Expressed was the wrong word. We the victims are tired of expression, I expressed a lot in his courtroom. The word we need is: acknowledged, taken into account, taken seriously.”

— Chanel Miller

105. “It also meant there was a population of victims in my vicinity, disguised in their everyday lives, going to work, refilling their coffee, eyes wide at night, waiting.”

— Chanel Miller

106. “Memory is often perceived as the victim’s weakness, but I believe memory is a victim’s greatest strength. Trauma provides a special way of moving through time; years fall away in an instant, we can summon terrorizing feelings as if they are happening in the present.”

— Chanel Miller

107. “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.”

— Chanel Miller

108. “If punishment is based on potential, privileged people will be given lighter sentences.”

— Chanel Miller

109. “Women are raised to work with dexterity, to keep their nimble fingers ready, their minds alert. It is her job to know how to handle the stream of bombs, how to kindly decline giving her number, how to move a hand from the button of her jeans, to turn down a drink. When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions people ask is, Did you say no?”

— Chanel Miller

110. “I feared, at times, that I had lost my imagination, because I felt boxed in my role as victim. But when I was trapped, I learned I could still move internally. When I felt depressed, I wrote and imagined my future down to the coffee bean. The children’s books I will illustrate, the chickens I will have in my yard, the soft cotton linens, the sauce-dipped wooden spoons on the counter. The need for it to come true according to plan was not important. The act of imagining was.”

— Chanel Miller

111. “My mom told us how she’d write all morning, hike in the afternoon, ticks latching on to her socks, and I thought how could you leave us for blood-eating bugs and seafood caviar? One time I asked her why she’d left, and she said, I want to be who I am. It was sort of impossible to argue with that.”

— Chanel Miller

112. “I had grown used to being unseen, to never being fully known.”

— Chanel Miller

113. “Victims receive heat when given any sum. Few acknowledge that healing is costly.”

— Chanel Miller

114. “I watched Lindsey Graham, beet red, teeth flared, finger-pointing. 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.”

— Chanel Miller

115. “But only one month ago my boss had offered me a raise, and something shook my head. My boyfriend offered me a room, but something shook my head. Coming all the way here seemed illogical and expensive and inexplicable. Yet here I was, sitting inside that idea, sweating inside that idea. It was the only thing in my life I’d ever truly chosen. No one told me I could do it, except me, which meant that no one could tell me I couldn’t do it, except me.”

— Chanel Miller

116. “None of our furniture matches. Our towels are not plush and white, but worn, featuring Scooby-Doo. When we have guests over for dinner parties, Tiffany and I hide all the books and deflated basketballs and lotion samples until everything is spotless. We aim to emulate the polished sheen of our friends’ houses. But afterward, it’s as if the house can unbutton its pants, release its gut, all of our items pouring out again.”

— Chanel Miller

117. “Rest assured, if you fail to fix the topic of your talk, I will follow you to every school you go to and give a follow up presentation.”

— Chanel Miller

118. “At twenty-two I was beginning to wonder if adulthood was just a series of endless losses.”

— Chanel Miller

119. “Two cyclists. For every person that wants to hurt me, there are more who want to help.”

— Chanel Miller

120. “It seemed wrong to group the dead. It was not seven; it was one and one and one and one and one and one and one. Each an entire life, each with a name.”

— Chanel Miller

121. “But I had yet to understand the system. If you pay enough money, if you say the right things, if you take enough time to weaken and dilute the truth, the sun could slowly begin to look like an egg. Not only was this possible, it happens all the time.”

— Chanel Miller

122. “Some men would be offended when I didn’t respond, one man saying, I’m just trying to start your day right. But the compliments didn’t feel like compliments when my body language communicated I didn’t want to be looked at, didn’t want to be spoken to. They didn’t feel like gifts when they were thrown at me or whispered so only I could hear. Every comment translated into, I like what I see and I want it. But I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I thought.”

— Chanel Miller

123. “If you’re wondering if I’ve forgiven him, I can only say hate is a heavy thing to carry, takes up too much space inside the self. It’s true that I’ll never stop hoping that he learns. If we don’t learn, what is life for? If I have forgiven him, it’s not because I’m holy. It’s because I need to clear a space inside myself where hard feelings can be put to rest.”

— Chanel Miller

124. “Why is it so hard to hear a story where the victim is cared for, justice properly served? Then came Judge Aquilina. I’d never questioned the short time limit I was given to read my statement, until Judge Aquilina made time for one hundred and sixty-nine statements. She made it clear each one was important. She invited restoration and compassion into a space I had associated only with torture.”

— Chanel Miller

125. “If you woke up to a robber in your home, saw him taking your stuff, people wouldn’t ask, Well why didn’t you fight him? Why didn’t you tell him no? He’s already violating an unspoken rule, why would he suddenly decide to adhere to reason? What would give you reason to think he’d stop if you told him to?”

— Chanel Miller

126. “I was not homesick, as I was not ready to return home, but I felt the unease of being adrift, of having no footholds in the world.”

— Chanel Miller

127. “Leave the guilt here. It doesn’t deserve any more of your family’s time. She shooed off the negative forces. Quit shaming and blaming the parents, she said. Trust me, you would not have known. And you would not have done anything differently. She said to the women, Leave your pain here and go out and do your magnificent things.”

— Chanel Miller

128. “It seemed once you submitted to walking through fraternity doors, all laws and regulation ceased. They were not asked to adhere to the same rules, yet there were countless guidelines women had to follow: cover your drink, stick close to others, don’t wear short skirts. Their behavior was the constant, while we were the variable expected to change. When did it become our job to do all the preventing and managing?”

— Chanel Miller

129. “This bothered me, this feigned politeness, a baseless cordiality.”

— Chanel Miller

130. “I have created a self inside the suffering.”

— Chanel Miller

131. “Life is large and messy, that nothing is black and white, there is no such thing as a linear trajectory, and at the end of the day it is a miracle just to wake up in the morning.”

— Chanel Miller

132. “These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. He spoke of the verdicts as if they were a disease that had befallen them. Verdict of what? Guilt. Guilt for what? Assault. Assault committed by whom? Brock. Your son has broken and shattered your family. But he could never say that.”

— Chanel Miller

133. “The goal should never be to insult, it should only be to teach, to expose larger issues so that we may learn something.”

— Chanel Miller

134. “Awful feelings may remain the same, but my capacity to handle them has grown.”

— Chanel Miller

135. “Just be yourself, she said. Which self, I wanted to reply.”

— Chanel Miller

136. “If he didn’t get what he wanted at that party, then he would at the next. We are taught assault is likely to occur, but if you dressed modestly, you’d lower the chances of it being you. But this would never eradicate the issue, only redirecting the assailant to another unsuspecting victim, offloading the violence.”

— Chanel Miller

137. “Whatever weight I’d been, I shouldn’t have been ashamed to declare it; a rock weighs differently than a lion weighs differently than a pile of mangoes and none of it matters.”

— Chanel Miller

138. “Rage activates, but too much of it cripples.”

— Chanel Miller

139. “The day I’d read my statement, I’d gone home believing I had failed. How many victims have been insulted, made small, because there were no other voices to counter that belief. How many of us have been made to feel humiliated, melodramatic, instead of brilliant, brave. One man could have kept me from awakening millions. Question who your realities are being written by. Reexamine who dictates it. Who decides you are important.”

— Chanel Miller

140. “Preventing assault is so much cheaper than trying to address it after the fact.”

— Chanel Miller

141. “I was teaching myself to ask for help, and in return beautiful things were happening.”

— Chanel Miller

142. “In other blackouts, I was responsible for acting a fool. But waking up to an empty McDonald’s bag and crumbs on my chest was different than waking up with dried blood and clothes missing.”

— Chanel Miller

143. “We’d gone to the party together and we’d been separated, and now we were together again, but not the same.”

— Chanel Miller

144. “Victims receive heat when given any sum. Few acknowledge that healing is costly. That we should be allocating more funds for victims, for therapy, extra security, potential moving costs, getting back on their feet, buying something as simple as court clothes. As Michele pointed out, Preventing assault is so much cheaper than trying to address it after the fact.”

— Chanel Miller

145. “Verbal consent is often mocked for killing the mood. But think of how much organic communication we do in life. A sampling table at the grocery store; you pick up a cracker, make eye contact with the vendor, May I? and they nod, Enjoy. Subtle and swift.”

— Chanel Miller

146. “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.”

— Chanel Miller

147. “I pulled out my small red notebook. I illuminated the pages with my phone, and wrote, I feel like I’ve already won. It was a small nod to myself; I had done the impossible, showed up. Those who watched me cry on the stand might have perceived me as fragile, but I believed it to be the quiet beginning of my strength.”

— Chanel Miller

148. “As a survivor, I feel a duty to provide a realistic view of the complexity of recovery. I am not here to rebrand the mess he made on campus. It is not my responsibility to alchemize what he did into healing words society can digest. I do not exist to be the eternal flame, the beacon, the flowers that bloom in your garden.”

— Chanel Miller

149. “My purpose will always be greater than my fear.”

— Chanel Miller

150. “I learned it was expensive to be assaulted.”

— Chanel Miller