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

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

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

— M.L. Rio

55. “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

56. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

63. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

65. “It’s like Romeo and Juliet.”

— M.L. Rio

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

70. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

85. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?” The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it,” I say.”

— M.L. Rio

92. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

98. “I am myself indifferent honest,” I admitted. “But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.”

— M.L. Rio

99. “He’d never been in my house and I was self-conscious, embarrassed by it. I was painfully aware of the fact that we didn’t have enough books.”

— M.L. Rio

100. “I am wretched. Destitute.”

— M.L. Rio