Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

104. “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

105. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

107. “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

108. “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

109. “When it was his turn to speak I watched him closely, uncertain whether he was acting only, or if he and I were both gnashing secrets between our teeth.”

— M.L. Rio

110. “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

111. “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

112. “Her unmasking was harsh, mesmeric, somehow dignified.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

114. “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

115. “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

116. “It’s like Romeo and Juliet.”

— M.L. Rio

117. “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

118. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

120. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

122. “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

123. “What are you thinking about?’ I said, ‘The same thing you’re thinking about.’ We didn’t even need to say your name.” She frowns down into the red pool of her wine. “It was just a kiss, but God, it hurt like hell.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

125. “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

126. “We’re all falling apart.”

— M.L. Rio

127. “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

128. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

130. “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

131. “Without him, without Dellecher, without my company of lyric-mad classmates, what would become of me?”

— M.L. Rio

132. “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

133. “Nothing is so exhausting as anguish.”

— M.L. Rio

134. “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

135. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

137. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “How swiftly, how suddenly everything had gone wrong. Where did it even begin?”

— M.L. Rio

143. “Lust is as close to hate as smoke to fire.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

148. “Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.”

— M.L. Rio

149. “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

150. “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