Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Her unmasking was harsh, mesmeric, somehow dignified.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “It’s like Romeo and Juliet.”

— M.L. Rio

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “We’re all falling apart.”

— M.L. Rio

117. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “Nothing is so exhausting as anguish.”

— M.L. Rio

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

129. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

131. “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

132. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

134. “Once upon a time, us.”

— M.L. Rio

135. “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

136. “Our last isolated, innocent moment; the stillness that precedes the blows and billows of a storm.”

— M.L. Rio

137. “Who is it that you’re jealous of? Him or me?”

— M.L. Rio

138. “You didn’t tell me.” I didn’t realize until it was out of my mouth that that alone was worse than any of the rest of it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

140. “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

141. “His bravado sounded suddenly false. He knew what I knew. For the moment, that was enough. The play would falter on.”

— M.L. Rio

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

146. “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

147. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

149. “I knew you better than you knew yourself. I was terrified you’d do exactly what you did.”

— M.L. Rio

150. “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