Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Assault buries the self. We lose sight of how and when we are allowed to occupy space. We are made to doubt our abilities, disparaged when we speak.”

— Chanel Miller

154. “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

155. “He stated that when he saw Deputy Shaw approach, he made the decision to run. While running, he heard the verbal commands to stop, but continued evading. He said it was a split-second decision and he regretted making it. Deputy Shaw would be the one to photograph my body three months after this incident.”

— Chanel Miller

156. “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

157. “For so long I believed history was a thick book you carried around in your backpack, not something you could create.”

— Chanel Miller

158. “I watched a man approach Alaleh, a neon-orange sticker on his shirt that said JURY and thought it was funny jury members were walking around labeled like Chiquita bananas.”

— Chanel Miller

159. “When I speak in opposition, I am grateful my voice is uncensored. I do not take my freedom of speech, my abundance of books, my access to education, my ease of first language for granted.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

161. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

171. “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

172. “Somehow the victim never wins.”

— Chanel Miller

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

180. “I did know that I wasn’t going to let the fear of what men might do dictate what the rest of my life was going to be.”

— Chanel Miller

181. “The thing about victims is that they wake up. Maybe you thought I’d never be able to go through with this.”

— Chanel Miller

182. “If she emerges, why don’t we ask her how it was possible she lived with that hurt for so long, ask who taught her to never uncover it.”

— Chanel Miller

183. “Something else was happening that I’d recognized in the hearing; the frequency of the word right. He’d planted answers in his questions rather than leave them open ended: Right? Isn’t that right? Correct? Right? To an observer, it would seem he was just verifying facts. But so much of it had not been right.”

— Chanel Miller

184. “My job is to observe, feel, document, report. What am I learning and seeing that other people can’t see? What doorways does my suffering lead to?”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller