Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I learned it was expensive to be assaulted.”

— Chanel Miller

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

161. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “Everything I need to get through this, I already have. Everything I need to know I already know. Everything I need to be, I already am.”

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

173. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

182. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

184. “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

185. “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