Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

53. “One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food – lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

55. “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

56. “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

57. “So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?”

— M.L. Rio

58. “Did that just happen? For God’s sake, it’s just a play.” “Well.” Frederick sighed, removed his glasses, and began to polish them on the hem of his shirt. “Duels have been fought over less.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

60. “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

61. “Tomorrow, if he tries anything, instead of assassination we give him a righteous ass-kicking.” “Here is my hand,” James said, after a split second’s hesitation. “The deed is worthy doing.” I hesitated also, a split second longer. “And so say I.”

— M.L. Rio

62. “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

63. “Nothing unites men like a common enemy.”

— M.L. Rio

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Would you carry my heart like a jewel in a box?” “I dunno. Would you carry my head around in a basket if I got decapitated by pirates?”

— M.L. Rio

68. “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

69. “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

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. “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

72. “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

73. “But in Shakespeare’s world, passion is irresistible, not embarrassing.”

— M.L. Rio

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

79. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

82. “We spent four years – and most of us years before that – immersed in Shakespeare. Submerged. Here we could indulge our collective obsession. We spoke it as a second language, conversed in poetry, and lost touch with reality, a little.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

85. “Nothing is so exhausting as anguish.”

— M.L. Rio

86. “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

87. “Like Aphrodite, she demanded exaltation and idolatry.”

— M.L. Rio

88. “We were a lot of things. Friends, brothers, partners in crime.”

— M.L. Rio

89. “The story has changed; we both feel it. It happens just like it did ten years ago: we find Richard in the water and we know nothing will ever be the same.”

— M.L. Rio

90. “I, on the other hand, was average in every imaginable way: not especially handsome, not especially talented, not especially good at anything but just good enough at everything that I could pick up whatever slack the others left.”

— M.L. Rio

91. “Acteurs zijn van nature opvliegend – wezens uit de alchemie, opgebouwd uit licht ontvlambare componenten, emoties, ego en nijd. Warm ze op, roer ze door elkaar en soms krijg je goud. Soms een catastrofe.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

93. “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

94. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

96. “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

97. “We spoke it as a second language, conversed in poetry, and lost touch with reality, a little.”

— M.L. Rio

98. “I decided that perhaps “brave” and “crazy” were not mutually exclusive.”

— M.L. Rio

99. “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

100. “He turned and lurched toward her so suddenly that everyone jumped back, but Meredith didn’t move an inch – she was either brave or crazy.”

— M.L. Rio