Top 100 Dot Hutchison Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “It was sick and wrong and profoundly twisted, and yet somehow it made us feel a lot better.”

— Dot Hutchison

52. “They’re powerful, emotional photographs, the kind of expressive, one-in-a-million shots any photographer is lucky to get, like the one of me reaching back for my sister as the paramedic carried me away. Those pictures get plastered everywhere because we’re a culture fascinated with crime, because we think the families’ private pain is for public consumption. Kiersten’s.”

— Dot Hutchison

53. “It was a strange kind of pain, choosing to lie there under the needles and let him write his ownership into my skin.”

— Dot Hutchison

54. “I think a trauma doesn’t stop just because you’ve been rescued.”

— Dot Hutchison

55. “It isn’t impossible to heal from that, but it leaves scars. It changes the way you look at people, how far you can trust or let people in. It changes your habits, even your desires and dreams. It changes who you are, and no matter how much you struggle back toward that place, that person you started as, you never actually get there. Some change is irreversible.”

— Dot Hutchison

56. “If you were afraid of something in the light, wasn’t it just good sense to be more afraid of it in the dark?”

— Dot Hutchison

57. “Because doors close,” I say instead, “and we can still miss what was on the other side even if we choose to walk away.”

— Dot Hutchison

58. “Right now, I think, it might be nice to be a religious person. It would be nice to have something or someone to pray to, with the relative certainty of being listened to. Then again, if I were a properly religious person, I probably wouldn’t be doing this, so. You know.”

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

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

— Dot Hutchison

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Dot Hutchison

70. “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

71. “Sometimes we only recognize our limits once we’ve passed them.”

— Dot Hutchison

72. “The Priya he knows is all sharp edges and snarls and smiles that slap you in the face like a challenge. Anything softer – anything kinder – is accidental.”

— Dot Hutchison

73. “So not only was I self-sufficient, I came to have a pretty low opinion of most people’s intelligence.”

— Dot Hutchison

74. “But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry.”

— Dot Hutchison

75. “We bear responsibility for our tempers, most especially when someone is harmed by accident. Shorter tempers require greater care from those burdened with them.”

— Dot Hutchison

76. “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. We always know exactly where we are and where we can go. And where we can’t.”

— Dot Hutchison

77. “Acknowledging the need, rationing the impulse.”

— Dot Hutchison

78. “It wouldn’t destroy Mum, though neither of us says it. It would shred her, maybe even shatter her, but the pieces would come back together sharper and stronger, made of purer steel, because if there’s one thing Deshani Sravasti will never be, it’s defeated.”

— Dot Hutchison

79. “I don’t like feeling vaguely endangered. I want a specific threat, something I can point to and say this and everyone understands, not a number of impressions that make women nod and men shake their heads.”

— Dot Hutchison

80. “It was like he translated his thoughts into music so they could make sense.”

— Dot Hutchison

81. “We heal, mostly, but even scars can bleed.”

— Dot Hutchison

82. “Seeing your own demons reflected back at you, it creates a safe place to just be wounded. It gives permission, in a way, to not be okay.”

— Dot Hutchison

83. “In terror she spoke, letting sink her wings till they trailed in the dust – in agony sobbed, letting sink her plumes till they trailed in the dust – till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry. All that was left to me was the terror and the agony and the sorrow.”

— Dot Hutchison

84. “I’m still struck by the extraordinary kindnesses people are capable of, not just for the Eddisons but for all the families.”

— Dot Hutchison

85. “Paperwork will, if left unattended, multiply exponentially, much like rabbits and wire coat hangers.”

— Dot Hutchison

86. “New York has so much history, but everyone in it just wants to know about the future.”

— Dot Hutchison

87. “I realized your answers couldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter why you did it, why you chose them, chose us, chose me. It doesn’t matter how you justify it, because the answers were never going to make sense to anyone else anyway. They were yours. And they were wrong. They were always, always wrong.”

— Dot Hutchison

88. “He regards us all with grave, worried eyes as he hands out bowls of western scramble, like omelets but lazier.”

— Dot Hutchison

89. “Taki and Karen had it, their daughter and her wife had it. But each time I saw it, I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary, something that not everyone found or was capable of recognizing and sustaining.”

— Dot Hutchison

90. “Moments I have to admit that she probably has sociopathic tendencies and simply chooses not to use her powers for excessive evil.”

— Dot Hutchison

91. “Well, no, but it keeps him from doing it again.” “So would his death, and without the sensationalism and tax money.”

— Dot Hutchison

92. “Someone is just dead!” said the little girl; for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God. 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

93. “I kept telling myself that I needed to learn to be braver, and Jesus, what a stupid thing to think. You don’t learn to be brave. You just have to do what’s right, even if it scares you.”

— Dot Hutchison

94. “Bliss explores a situation by lighting a match and letting it explode. Inara watches first, observes. She waits to speak until she knows what she wants to say and has a healthy guess as to how others will react to it.”

— Dot Hutchison

95. “Give it to God,” he says simply. “How you feel about it is yours and yours alone. Whether or not you should be judged; that’s for God.”

— Dot Hutchison

96. “Deshani regales them with tales of her misogynist assistant, who can’t manage to hide how disgusted he is to be reporting to a woman, and her own delight in offering him a demotion if he’d prefer a male boss. It’s sharp and funny, and Eddison gets the feeling that the only reason the idiot hasn’t been fired is because Deshani finds him entertaining. It’s a little disturbing. It’s.”

— Dot Hutchison

97. “You really think broken children care about justice?” “Wouldn’t you?” “Never really did, no. Justice is a faulty thing at the best of times, and it doesn’t actually fix anything.” “Would you say that if you’d gotten justice as a child?” That not-quite-smile, bitter and gone too fast. “And what would I have needed justice for?” “My life’s work, and you think I won’t recognize a broken child when she sits in front of me?”

— Dot Hutchison

98. “Guilt doesn’t have to make sense; it just is.”

— Dot Hutchison

99. “Well, pregnant, I guess. Being too pregnant is a bit like being too dead; it’s not really a flexible state.”

— Dot Hutchison

100. “Even when something’s wrong, the ending of the thing hurts.”

— Dot Hutchison