Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Society gives women the near impossible task of separating harmlessness from danger, the foresight of knowing what some men are capable of. When we call out assault when we hear it, Trump says, I don’t think you understand. Just words. You are overreacting, overly offended, hysterical, rude, relax!!! So we dismiss threatening statements and warning signs, apologizing for our paranoia.”

— Chanel Miller

102. “I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I’ve found that victims identify more with pain than platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living.”

— Chanel Miller

103. “I always like to say “be the Swede”. Show up for the vulnerable, do your part, help each other and face the darkest parts alongside survivors.”

— Chanel Miller

104. “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

105. “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

106. “When I’d advocated for him to take classes and be in therapy, she mistook it as a nurturing passivity, gentle absolution. What I meant was take note of his mental health, because in my experience, when men were upset, lonely, or neglected, we were killed.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

108. “Never fight to injure, fight to uplift.”

— Chanel Miller

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

116. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

119. “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

120. “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

121. “These rules were fascinating to me; the body dictating what you must do. I had fallen into the habit of neglecting my body, often forgetting to feed it, and when I was assaulted I refused even to look at it. Now my body was saying, you have to listen to me. You have to respect my needs. We have to work together or you will end up hurt.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

127. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

129. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “Denying darkness does not bring anyone closer to the light.”

— Chanel Miller

143. “He was the one who lost everything, I was just the nobody that it happened to.”

— Chanel Miller

144. “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

145. “Mama bought 4 different kinds of ice cream for you!”

— Chanel Miller

146. “When I was little, I never asked anyone if I was an artist. I just cleared enough space on the table to make room for my paper.”

— Chanel Miller

147. “But I also knew this feeling would not be infinite. As soon as the sun came up, the worst would be behind me.”

— Chanel Miller

148. “In the past year, snow had fallen and melted, my hair had been cut and grown, the world kept moving, and I could’ve continued to move on with it, yet I had returned. What did it mean, that I kept finding myself in this tiny room, abandoning an orderly life to keep fighting. Didn’t this count for something?”

— Chanel Miller

149. “I read comments that laughed at my pain. I remember feeling helpless, terrified, humiliated, I cried like I’ve never cried before. But I remember the attorney’s still shoulders as guilty was read. I know Brock slept ninety days in a stiff cot in a jail cell. The judge will never step foot in a courtroom again. The appellate attorney’s claims were shut down. One by one, they became powerless, fell away, and when the dust settled, I looked around to see who was left. Only Emily Doe.”

— Chanel Miller

150. “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