Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Alexander squeezed my arm. “And I and now we three have spoke it, let the stupid bastard do his worst.”

— M.L. Rio

152. “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

153. “Once upon a time, us.”

— M.L. Rio

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Like she’s a shark and you’re an oblivious fur seal.” Me: “Why is that the word everyone’s using to describe me lately?” James: “Who else called you a fur seal?” Me: “Not that. Never mind.”

— M.L. Rio

157. “I stole furtive glances at my classmates as they wrote and listened and occasionally posed questions, struck by how lucky I was to be among them.”

— M.L. Rio

158. “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

159. “I bought a copy of the complete works with my precious pocket money and carried it everywhere, all too happy to ignore the less poetic reality of the outside world.”

— M.L. Rio

160. “No man is, perhaps, until he experiences it himself and deniability is no longer plausible. What were we, then? In ten years I have not found an adequate word to describe us.”

— M.L. Rio

161. “There was something unfamiliar in his smile, some fierce gladness that made me at once eager and uneasy.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

163. “More willing to go to war than face my own ugly, meager demons.”

— M.L. Rio

164. “I wanted, in some strange way, to thank him for refusing to believe me.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

166. “The absurdity of the matter does not make it any less true.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

168. “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

169. “For you it was just one day, then business as usual. For us it was one day, and every single day that came after.” I lean forward on my elbows, so my face is only a few inches from his, so he hears every word when I lower my voice. “It must eat you alive, not knowing. Not knowing who, not knowing how, not knowing why. But you didn’t know him.”

— M.L. Rio

170. “He tilted his head back to admire the sky. “It looks farther away when they’re so little of it.”

— M.L. Rio

171. “James looked up, looked right at me. He seemed surprised to see me standing there, though I didn’t know for the life of me why he should be. Was I not always his right-hand man, his lieutenant? Banquo or Benvolio or Oliver – little difference.”

— M.L. Rio

172. “Eighteen and vulnerable, I’d felt for the first time the extraordinary dread of wanting something so desperately and watching it slip through my fingers, so I took the risk of telling him I would go to Dellecher or nowhere.”

— M.L. Rio

173. “Everything was bleak and gray, the lake dull and lusterless under a thin layer of ice. From so far and so high, it looked like a fogged mirror, and I imagined God reaching down to smear the glass clean with his sleeve.”

— M.L. Rio

174. “My martyrdom is not the selfless kind. I can’t look at Filippa, shamed by all the injuries I’ve inflicted- like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest, ready to blow himself up without a thought for the collateral damage.”

— M.L. Rio

175. “This is the sort of game where people get hurt.”

— M.L. Rio

176. “The idea that I would have to... let go of him, before we were old and falling to bits, never occurred to me,” Wren went on, picking her words one by one, like a child stepping from stone to stone to cross a stream. “But it doesn’t just feel like I’ve lost a cousin. It feels like I’ve lost part of myself.”

— M.L. Rio

177. “My chest ached, but the ache went deeper than muscle and bone, like some sharp thing had ripped a little hole right through me.”

— M.L. Rio

178. “I breathed in and held the sweet woody air in my lungs for as long as I could.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

180. “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.”

— M.L. Rio

181. “What did she want to tell me that was so tremendous it had drawn tears from her, a woman made of marble?”

— M.L. Rio

182. “The next half hour was devoted to a series of painful yoga positions. Gwendolyn, for a woman in her sixties, was disturbingly limber. As the minute hand inched toward the nine, she straightened up from her King Pigeon Pose with an ecstatic sigh that must have made someone besides me uncomfortable.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

185. “It means that you have better reasons than the rest of us to hold a grudge, but you’re also the first one who’s going to forgive him.”

— M.L. Rio