Top 180 Chanel Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

163. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

176. “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

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

— Chanel Miller

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

— Chanel Miller

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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