Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Masculinity is often defined by physicality, but that initial kneeling is as powerful as the leg sweep, the tackling. Masculinity is found in the vulnerability, the crying.”

— Chanel Miller

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

122. “You are more powerful than anyone who has ever hurt you. It is not pathetic to feel and react. You are stronger than you know, even if you can’t feel it yet.”

— Chanel Miller

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Gone is the luxury of growing up slowly. So begins the brutal awakening.”

— Chanel Miller

126. “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

127. “Pain, when examined closely, became clarity.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

129. “History is where you will find people who have been through what you’re experiencing. Not only been there but survived it. Not only survived it but changed it.”

— Chanel Miller

130. “This was not one bad sentence. This was the best we could hope for.”

— Chanel Miller

131. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

133. “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

134. “The girl running arms wide into the ocean is gone. In her place is a woman wrapped in two coats, staring at the black water, mistaking lumps of seaweed for dormant bodies, the stones for crouching men.”

— Chanel Miller

135. “I began to belong more to my present than my past. I was no longer trying to get somewhere, only asking myself, Are you improving? Sometimes the answer was not today. Sometimes I was regressing. But the voice in my head was now gentler. Whatever the answer, I was patient and understanding.”

— Chanel Miller

136. “At twenty-two I was beginning to wonder if adulthood was just a series of endless losses. What benefits were there to growing up? How do you feel all these heavy things for the rest of your life?”

— Chanel Miller

137. “Remember who you are, what you like about yourself.”

— Chanel Miller

138. “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. The judge was not God.”

— Chanel Miller

139. “I had grown up in the margins; in the media Asian Americans were assigned side roles, submissive, soft-spoken secondary characters. I had grown used to being unseen, to never being fully known.”

— Chanel Miller

140. “If you get through this night, you are promised to survive all the days ahead.”

— Chanel Miller

141. “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

142. “Somehow the victim never wins.”

— Chanel Miller

143. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Chanel Miller