Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We’re all falling apart.”

— M.L. Rio

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “I could still see it. Richard suspended on the surface of life, bloodied, gasping – and the rest of us simply watching, waiting for the curtain to drop. Revenge tragedy, I wanted to say.”

— M.L. Rio

110. “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

111. “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

112. “I am wretched. Destitute.”

— M.L. Rio

113. “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

114. “I don’t know, it’s like I look at you and all the sonnets start making sense.”

— M.L. Rio

115. “We cracked up”, I say, but the phrase feels wrong. It was not so simple, or as clean, as a piece of fractured glass. “But we didn’t really shatter until we were all back together again.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

117. “Hm,” she said, gaze descending slowly from the top of my head to my feet with the cold scrutiny of a slave trader at auction. “Well. Shall we get started?”

— M.L. Rio

118. “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

119. “Nothing is so exhausting as anguish.”

— M.L. Rio

120. “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

121. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

123. “His voice sounded flat, wrong, as if someone had struck a false note on the piano.”

— M.L. Rio

124. “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

125. “I never wanted you to look at me the way you’re looking at me right now.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

127. “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

128. “Sentimos todas las pasiones de los personajes que interpretamos como si fueran nuestras. Pero las emociones de un personaje no anulan las del actor; en lugar de eso, sientes las dos al mismo tiempo.”

— M.L. Rio

129. “Everyone seems to remember it differently.” There was a subtle, cloying challenge in his voice. Answer if you dare.”

— M.L. Rio

130. “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

131. “She looked at me like I was crazy, but then – to my relief and my delight – she laughed, the sound wild and lovely, like a tiger lily bursting open.”

— M.L. Rio

132. “The world was perfectly still for one precious instant. Then there was a crash, a shout, and something inside shattered.”

— M.L. Rio

133. “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

134. “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. He was the handsomest of us, but more charming than that was his childlike depth of feeling, onstage and off.”

— M.L. Rio

135. “In that brief one moment, I actually wondered if “okay” or something like it might still be possible. 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

136. “Our sheer capacity for feeling got to be so unwieldy that we staggered under it, like Atlas with the weight of the world.”

— M.L. Rio

137. “Ik kreeg de merkwaardige gedachte dat ze bij zichzelf overwoog ‘ik hou van je’ te zeggen. Het verschil tussen ons was dat ze altijd aannam dat mensen dat soort dingen wel wisten, terwijl ik me er altijd zorgen om maakte dat ze het niet wisten.”

— M.L. Rio

138. “I looped one arm around her neck, pulled her close, and kissed her temple. I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in.”

— M.L. Rio

139. “The yard twinkled as though several hundred obliging fireflies had decided to attend the party.”

— M.L. Rio

140. “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

141. “For the first time in a long time, that little rip in the middle of me, the black bruise on my soul that’s been struggling to heal for nearly a decade, throbs. Old feelings come softly thronging back. Bittersweetness, discord, and confusion.”

— M.L. Rio

142. “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

143. “I’ve hope to live, and am prepared to die.”

— M.L. Rio

144. “Instead he was handsome the way you think of the devil as handsome-forbiddingly so.”

— M.L. Rio

145. “That loathsome opiate, relief, raced through my veins again – sharp and lucid at the initial prick, before everything went numb.”

— M.L. Rio

146. “Richard wasn’t an easy person to like, But he was an easy person to love.”

— M.L. Rio

147. “Alexander squeezed my arm. “And I and now we three have spoke it, let the stupid bastard do his worst.”

— M.L. Rio

148. “Here you will make many friends, and perhaps a few enemies. 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

149. “Once upon a time, us.”

— M.L. Rio

150. “People often wanted my explanation of my relationship with James – which seemed inherently unfair, expecting one half of an equation to account for the whole – but no one has ever offered their own diagnosis.”

— M.L. Rio