Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

163. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

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

— M.L. Rio

169. “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

170. “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

171. “James,” I said, with no idea what I meant to say after. He turned the water off, one hand lingering on the handle. A few tiny drops clung to his eyelashes, rolled down his face like tears. “What?” he said, slightly delayed.”

— M.L. Rio

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

176. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

178. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

180. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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