Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Nothing makes sense to him either. His whole world is falling apart, and once he realizes he can’t stop it or fix it or change it, there’s only one thing left to do.” My eyes adjusted slowly, maddeningly. “What’s that?” His shadow shrugged in the gloom. “Absolve yourself. Blame it on fate.”

— M.L. Rio

52. “It’s possible,” I say. “I never asked. He was my friend – much more than that, truthfully – and that was enough. I didn’t need to know why.”

— M.L. Rio

53. “Not sure if I can see him as a sparrow. Too... delicate’ ‘So what kind of bird would he be?’ ‘Dunno. The sort that smacked into a window trying to have a go at its own reflection.”

— M.L. Rio

54. “Enter the players. seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces. We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum.”

— M.L. Rio

55. “For us, everything was a performance. Everything poetic.”

— M.L. Rio

56. “It was just us – the seven of us and the trees and the sky and the lake and the moon and, of course, Shakespeare. He lived with us like an eighth housemate, an older, wiser friend, perpetually out of sight but never out of mind, as if he had just left the room.”

— M.L. Rio

57. “Shakespeare is real, but his characters live in a world of real extremes. They swing from ecstasy to anguish, love to hate, wonder to terror. It’s not melodrama, though, they’re not exaggerating. Every moment is crucial.”

— M.L. Rio

58. “What were we, then? In ten years I have not found an adequate word to describe us.”

— M.L. Rio

59. “The things about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent... he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”

— M.L. Rio

60. “How many fond fools serve mad jealousy!” Richard declared.”

— M.L. Rio

61. “You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it – not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.”

— M.L. Rio

62. “It hurts too much to talk about. My teeth ache in my head. I open my mouth to speak, but what comes out instead is a gasp, a sob, and the grief that shock has kept at bay crashes through me like a flood. I pitch forward, that strange twisted laugh that’s been stuck in my throat for ten years finally bursting out.”

— M.L. Rio

63. “Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.”

— M.L. Rio

64. “Actors are by nature volatile – alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”

— M.L. Rio

65. “I was seized by the strange unfounded idea that she was debating whether or not to say I love you. But the difference between us was that she assumed people just knew these sorts of things, while I always worried that they didn’t.”

— M.L. Rio

66. “There are things they don’t tell you about such beautiful places – that they’re as dangerous as they are beautiful.”

— M.L. Rio

67. “There had always been small rivalries between us, but never before such an open display of hostility. With a sip of tea, I persuaded myself that we were all simply overreacting. Actors are by nature volatile – alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”

— M.L. Rio

68. “Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”

— M.L. Rio

69. “It is a unique kind of torture for an actor, to have an audiences undivided attention and to turn your back on them for shame.”

— M.L. Rio

70. “But I stayed where I was, afraid to move toward him, afraid I might lose my footing on solid ground, detach from what had anchored me before and drift out into the void of space – a vagabond, wandering moon.”

— M.L. Rio

71. “Sleep crawled on top of me like an affectionate, purring pet-.”

— M.L. Rio

72. “Absolve yourself. Blame it on fate.”

— M.L. Rio

73. “I can still see it, lush and green and wild, in some tiny way enchanted, like Oberon’s wood, or Prospero’s island. There are things they don’t tell you about such magical places – that they’re as dangerous as they are beautiful.”

— M.L. Rio

74. “But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart – by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.”

— M.L. Rio

75. “I have nothing of my own now, not even secrets.”

— M.L. Rio

76. “You want me to stay?” I asked. I didn’t want to leave him. “Please,” he said, in a small voice. “I just couldn’t deal with the rest of them, for a while.”

— M.L. Rio

77. “He drowned himself on the last day of December, and though the local authorities dragged the freezing water for days and miles, his body was never found.”

— M.L. Rio

78. “He turned to go, and I darted around to bar his path again. My desire to keep him there had, at some point, transcended the alignment of an actor’s motivation and his character’s. I desperately wanted him to stay, seized by the nonsensical idea that if he left, I would lose him, irretrievably. “Tell me in sadness, who is that you love,” I said, searching the parts of his face I could see for a flicker of reciprocal feeling.”

— M.L. Rio

79. “Anything can feel like punishment if it’s taught poorly.”

— M.L. Rio

80. “It’s like Romeo and Juliet.”

— M.L. Rio

81. “Do not let the latter prospect frighten you – if you haven’t made any enemies in life, you’ve been living too safely.”

— M.L. Rio

82. “Como si la vida de Edmundo lo hubiera abandonado y lo que quedaba de la suya ya no fuera suficiente para moverse.”

— M.L. Rio

83. “Only three of us left. James, Richard, me. Gunpowder, fire, fuse.”

— M.L. Rio

84. “I leaned heavily on the balustrade, trembling under the weight of parallel truths that I had, until then, been able to ignore: James was in love with Wren, and I was blindly, savagely jealous.”

— M.L. Rio

85. “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. With us it ambled, trotted, and galloped all through October.”

— M.L. Rio

86. “She says, “Were you in love with him?” “Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.”

— M.L. Rio

87. “James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.”

— M.L. Rio

88. “Gli attori sono per natura instabili: creature alchemiche composte di elementi incendiari, emozione ed ego e invidia. Surriscaldali, rimestali insieme, e a volte otterrai l’oro. Altre un disastro.”

— M.L. Rio

89. “The lake, the broad black water, lurked in the background of every scene we played after that – like a set from a play we did once, shuffled to the back of the scene shop where it would have been quickly forgotten if we didn’t have to walk past it every day. Something changed irrevocably, in those few dark minutes James was submerged, as if the lack of oxygen had caused all our molecules to rearrange.”

— M.L. Rio

90. “He was too spotless to talk of blood and murder like Macbeth, but in the red glare of the fire he no longer looked so angelic. Instead he was handsome the way you think of the devil as handsome – forbiddingly so.”

— M.L. Rio

91. “I did not: he was but a fool that brought My answer back. Brutus hath rived my heart. A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities, But Brutus makes mine greater than they are.”

— M.L. Rio

92. “When it was his turn to speak I watched him closely, uncertain whether he was acting only, or if he and I were both gnashing secrets between our teeth.”

— M.L. Rio

93. “She turned away from the fire, and I was relieved not to find her frowning. Instead, she looked at me with a sad, stricken expression. I was seized by the strange unfounded idea that she was debating whether or not to say I love you. But the difference between us was that she assumed people just knew those sorts of things, while I was always worried that they didn’t.”

— M.L. Rio

94. “Some people saw me as Gwendolyn always cast me: simply the loyal sidekick. James was so quintessentially a hero that this didn’t bother me.”

— M.L. Rio

95. “He was the sort of actor everyone fell in love with as soon as he stepped onstage, and I was no exception.”

— M.L. Rio

96. “There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces.”

— M.L. Rio

97. “Our holidays weren’t so different, probably – hours of reading and staring at the ceiling, isolated from siblings and parents so unfamiliar that they might as well have been different species.”

— M.L. Rio

98. “We’re all falling apart.”

— M.L. Rio

99. “We stood numb and silent on the dock as the earth ceased to turn. A terrible stillness held our six warm breathing bodies and Richard – unmoving, inanimate thing – in the same unbreakable thrall. Then there was a sound, a soft groan; Richard stretched one hand feebly toward us, and the whole world lurched. Wren stifled a scream and James grabbed my arm. “Oh, God.” He choked on the word. “He’s still alive.”

— M.L. Rio

100. “How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.”

— M.L. Rio