Top 100 Dot Hutchison Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— 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 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

5. “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

6. “The public steals tragedies from victims. It sounds strange, I know, but I think you may be one of the few people who’ll understand what I mean by that. These things happened to us, to our loved ones, but it hits the news and suddenly everyone with a TV or computer feels like they’re entitled to our reactions and recoveries. They’re not. It takes a while to really believe it, but you owe them nothing.”

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

13. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

16. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

18. “Three butterflies for a broken girl: one for personality, one for possession, and one for pettiness.”

— Dot Hutchison

19. “There are dead girls to mourn, and living girls who will struggle for years to adjust to life outside the Garden, if they even can. He still counts this as a good day.”

— Dot Hutchison

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

24. “No matter what happens, she will never let the world break her permanently.”

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

26. “Scars fade. They don’t disappear. It isn’t right. We live with the memories; why do we have to live with the scars as well?”

— 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. “The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.”

— 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. “I take a deep breath, give myself the time to truly think it through. There are moments I realize just how unconventional my relationship with Mum is. Moments I have to admit that she probably has sociopathic tendencies and simply chooses not to use her powers for excessive evil. And I am my mother’s daughter. “How.”

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

34. “If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.”

— Dot Hutchison

35. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

41. “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

42. “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

43. “When silence is a living thing, it can be a friend, sometimes even a comfort.”

— Dot Hutchison

44. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

46. “Listen to what isn’t being said.”

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

48. “There is very little uglier than plowed snow. The roads are clear, though, and all the sidewalks are tinted blue from the salt. It feels like walking over the remnants of a Smurf slaughter.”

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

50. “What wasn’t known was created, what wasn’t created eventually ceased to matter.”

— Dot Hutchison