Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “If punishment is based on potential, privileged people will be given lighter sentences. Brock was shielded inside projections of what people like him grow up to become, or are supposed to become. Orthopedic surgeon. Biomedical engineer. All-American Athlete. Olympian. The judge argued he’d already lost so much, given up so many opportunities. What happens to those who start off with little to lose?”

— Chanel Miller

102. “Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift.”

— Chanel Miller

103. “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

104. “For years, the crime of sexual assault depended on our silence. The fear of knowing what happened if we spoke. Society gave us one thousand reasons; don’t speak if you lack evidence, if it happened too long ago, if you were drunk, if the man is powerful, if you’ll face blowback, if it threatens your safety. Ford broke all the rules. She had none of the requirements society tells us we need before we dare open our mouths.”

— Chanel Miller

105. “What they were really saying is, victims can’t write. Victims aren’t smart, capable, or independent. They need external help to articulate their thoughts, needs, and demands. They are too emotional to compose anything coherent. It cannot be the same drunk girl who was found unconscious, the one who the media said uncontrollably sobbed throughout testimony. On a deep level, they wanted to take away my writing, which I would not give up so easily.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

114. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

116. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

118. “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

119. “But Michele understood how long things take. She’d been battling Stanford for over a decade. Social change is a marathon, she’d said. Not a sprint. You do all you can in the time that you have. By time she meant lifetime, that over the span of our lives we may not see everything we want corrected, but still we fight.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

125. “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

126. “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

127. “I got assaulted, there are no trophies for that. What dignity is there in being discarded half naked?”

— Chanel Miller

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

133. “They did not mistake my submission for weakness, so I did not feel a need to prove myself, to show them I was more than this. They knew. Shame could not breathe here, would be shooed away.”

— Chanel Miller

134. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

137. “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

138. “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

139. “Somehow the victim never wins.”

— Chanel Miller

140. “They could never truly have rejected me since they had never fully known me.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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