Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?”

— M.L. Rio

52. “Secrets carry weight, like lead.”

— M.L. Rio

53. “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

54. “The sky was clear and quiet, stars peering curiously down at us from a wide dome of indigo. The water, too, was still, and I thought, what liars they are, the sky and the water. Still and calm and clear, like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, and really, it never would be again.”

— M.L. Rio

55. “I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story. Far too many times I had asked myself whether art was imitating life or if it was the other way around.”

— M.L. Rio

56. “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

57. “The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

59. “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

60. “You know everyone calls you ‘nice’... but that’s not the word. You’re good. So good you have no idea how good you are.”

— M.L. Rio

61. “I think you understand it perfectly. 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.”

— M.L. Rio

62. “People always forget about Filippa,” I add. “And later they always wish they hadn’t.”

— M.L. Rio

63. “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

64. “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

65. “I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in.”

— M.L. Rio

66. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

68. “When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses. Ritual madness, ecstasy, human sacrifice.”

— M.L. Rio

69. “He’d rolled toward me sometime in the night, and his head was tucked against my shoulder, breath racing down my arm every time he exhaled. The strange sudden thought that I didn’t want to move struck me, with the surprising lucidity of a sunbeam slanting right in my eyes. His warm drowsy weight in the bed beside me felt natural, comfortable, comme il faut.”

— M.L. Rio

70. “Everyone in the room was watching James – how could they not? – but I was the only one who really knew him, every inch.”

— M.L. Rio

71. “His arm fell lifelessly to his side. He looked away and said, “Oliver, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to hurt the whole world.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

73. “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

74. “Maybe every day we let grief in, we’ll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we’ll be able to breathe again. At least, that’s how Shakespeare would tell the story. Hamlet says, ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’. But just awhile. The show’s not over. ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight’. The rest of us must go on.”

— M.L. Rio

75. “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

76. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

78. “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

79. “Los secretos son cargas pesadas como el plomo.”

— M.L. Rio

80. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story.”

— M.L. Rio

86. “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

87. “I am all too aware of my own desperate need to find a message in the madness, and as it takes shape I am suspicious, afraid to hope. But the implications of the text and its small part in our story are impossible to ignore, too critical for a scholar as meticulous as James to overlook.”

— M.L. Rio

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

95. “I am wretched. Destitute.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

97. “I’m afraid,” she said, after what felt like a year, speaking very slowly, “that I’m prettier than I am talented or intelligent, and that because of that no one will ever take me seriously. As a performer or a person.”

— M.L. Rio

98. “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

99. “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

100. “Would you change the ending, if you could? What if Benvolio came forward and said, ‘I killed Tybalt. It was me.”

— M.L. Rio