Top 100 Dot Hutchison Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”

— Dot Hutchison

2. “Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening – the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet.”

— Dot Hutchison

3. “When everything is spiraling out of control, no one can dig in and hold steady. Not really. They lash out, desperate to grab onto anything. They lash out.”

— Dot Hutchison

4. “I uphold the law. It isn’t perfect but it’s the law, and it’s what we have. Without justice, we have no order and no hope.” Victor watches the girl absorb that, turn it over. “I like your idea of justice,” she says finally. “I’m just not sure it really exists.”

— Dot Hutchison

5. “Anything tries to destroy them, they’ll burn the world to take it down with them.”

— Dot Hutchison

6. “Scars mean we survived something, even when the wounds still hurt.”

— Dot Hutchison

7. “I take pictures of everything anyway, even though they’ll mostly turn out crap on the phone, because taking pictures is just what I do. The world seems a little less frightening, somehow, if I can keep the camera lens between me and everything else.”

— Dot Hutchison

8. “Do we have a perfect job? No. Do we do a perfect job? No. It isn’t possible. But we do our job, and at the end of the day, we do a hell of a lot more good than harm. Inara’s good at deflecting; you can’t let her get under your skin.”

— Dot Hutchison

9. “I could be the little match girl and strike my illusions against the wall, lost in the warmth until the glow faded and left me back in the Garden.”

— Dot Hutchison

10. “Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact.”

— Dot Hutchison

11. “Beautiful things are short-lived, he told me the first time we met. He made sure of that, and then he strove to give his Butterflies a strange breed of immortality.”

— Dot Hutchison

12. “You draw a map, you make a plan, and then it’s all suddenly upended, and you’re so caught up in the changes as they happen that it doesn’t really sink in until further down the road.”

— Dot Hutchison

13. “One of the nice things about New York was that no one ever asked questions. It’s just one of those places people go to, you know? It’s a dream, it’s a goal, it’s a place you can disappear amidst millions of other people doing the same thing. No one cares where you came from or why you left because they’re too focused on themselves and what they want and where they’re going.”

— Dot Hutchison

14. “Unless the Gardener was visiting you, darkness in the Garden was the closest we got to truth.”

— Dot Hutchison

15. “She didn’t know that I’d sat on a black-and-red painted horse and finally understood that my parents didn’t love me, or at least didn’t love me nearly enough.”

— Dot Hutchison

16. “You were in there, no chance of escape, no way of going back to the life you knew, so why cling to it? Why cause yourself more pain by remembering what you don’t get to have anymore?” “Are you saying you forgot?” “I’m saying he called me Maya.”

— Dot Hutchison

17. “Andamos por la vida con nuestras cicatrices, y a veces el dolor es tan real como el recuerdo.”

— Dot Hutchison

18. “My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”

— Dot Hutchison

19. “That’s life, right?” “No,” Victor says quietly. “It isn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t be.” “But that’s not the same thing. Is and shouldn’t are entirely different things.”

— Dot Hutchison

20. “Beauty loses its meaning when you’re.”

— Dot Hutchison

21. “Words never mean anything. Look beneath them.”

— Dot Hutchison

22. “The day I finally understood – and accepted – that I wasn’t wanted.”

— Dot Hutchison

23. “I am never going to make that decision for you. You are my daughter, and I will always be your sounding board and give you advice, but I can’t just tell you what to do. Not like that. You are your own person, and you have to make the choice you can live with.”

— Dot Hutchison

24. “I’m not a fake person; I’m carefully and genuinely handcrafted.”

— Dot Hutchison

25. “The carousel’s over now,” he tells her quietly. “This time your family is waiting for you.”

— Dot Hutchison

26. “Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact. No one actually gets to live their lives that way.”

— Dot Hutchison

27. “MARCO!” she yells, and there’s a ripple of shocked laughter through the trees.”

— Dot Hutchison

28. “If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right?”

— Dot Hutchison

29. “My name is Rachel,” she whispered against my skin. “Rachel Young. Will you remember?”

— Dot Hutchison

30. “If you expect to be overlooked or forgotten, you’re always at least a little surprised when someone remembers you. You’re always outside understanding those strange creatures who actually expect people to remember and come back.”

— Dot Hutchison

31. “Once upon a time there was a little girl who was scared of the dark. Which was silly, even she knew that. There was nothing in the dark to hurt you that wasn’t also in the light. You just couldn’t see it coming.”

— Dot Hutchison

32. “The ones who’ll set the world on fire if they have to burn. They sound like my kind of people.”

— Dot Hutchison

33. “Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.”

— Dot Hutchison

34. “She was incapable of insulting us, because the words have to have meaning to hurt.”

— Dot Hutchison

35. “She hated seeing herself in pictures because her eyes always yelled the things she wasn’t allowed to say, and still no one listened.”

— Dot Hutchison

36. “When I pull out the camera and look through the viewer, the world seems to sharpen. Focus. Not that terrible things aren’t still out there, or even in here, but there’s a glass barrier between all of that and me. It’s.”

— Dot Hutchison

37. “Even when she seems forthcoming, her answers almost always veer sideways, providing something like substance without giving away the heart.”

— Dot Hutchison

38. “Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.”

— Dot Hutchison

39. “Poor Eddison. With the exception of Vic, he’s doomed to spend his life surrounded by strong, prickly, opinionated women, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve never really been sure what he did to deserve such glorious distress.”

— Dot Hutchison

40. “Marlene Hanoverian’s raspberry trifle,” she says dreamily. “I’d marry her if she swung that way.” “And if she didn’t have fifty-plus years on you?” “Those fifty-plus years have taught her to make the best goddamn pistachio cannoli ever. I am all sorts of good with those extra decades.”

— Dot Hutchison

41. “I’m constitutionally incapable of trusting people who treat their books that badly.”

— Dot Hutchison

42. “The only thing that made me truly different was that I was the only one who never cried.”

— Dot Hutchison

43. “Sadness and grief aren’t the same thing. It’s why they have different words. Maybe it’s a subtle distinction, but we don’t keep a word in a language if it doesn’t still have a purpose of its own. Synonyms are never exact things.”

— Dot Hutchison

44. “No, I’m engaging in a discussion about perspective and moral relativity.”

— Dot Hutchison

45. “And that stupid little girl stood in the winter and kept lighting matches to catch glimpses of families that weren’t – could never be – hers and froze to death in those harsh moments of reality between matches, because even though matches can burn, they’re light, not heat.”

— Dot Hutchison

46. “What I have is a healthy sense of spite and a determination that someday I’m going to learn how to do this thing called living. Maybe that’s as far as justice can stretch.”

— Dot Hutchison

47. “You seem to have this strange image of me as a lost child, like I’ve just been thrown on the side of the road like garbage or roadkill. But kids like me, we’re not lost; we may be the only ones who never are.”

— Dot Hutchison

48. “My keeping it just meant that she was important to me.”

— Dot Hutchison

49. “At night, the creature that was the Garden peeled back its synthetic skin to show the skeleton beneath.”

— Dot Hutchison

50. “Being a victim isn’t something that disappears as soon as you’re rescued. It doesn’t vanish the moment the people who hurt you are taken into custody. That sense of it, that awareness of being not just victimized but a victim, it sticks to your bones for years, even decades. That sense of the thing can cause as much damage as the original trauma, as life goes on.”

— Dot Hutchison