Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “If you haven’t made any enemies in life, you’ve been living too safely.”

— M.L. Rio

152. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

154. “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

155. “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

156. “The show’s not over. The rest of us must go on.”

— M.L. Rio

157. “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

158. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

166. “Once upon a time, us.”

— M.L. Rio

167. “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

168. “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

169. “It’s frighteningly easy to get lost in your own subconscious; any place you think you know is different after dark.”

— M.L. Rio

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “He should have been dumber. Anybody that good-looking deserved to be dumb.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

175. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

177. “Are you high?” “No.” “Are you full of crap?” “Yes.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

180. “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

181. “I’m afraid that I am prettier than I am talented or intelligent, and because of that no one will ever take me seriously.”

— M.L. Rio

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

186. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

189. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “I devour five, six, ten old articles, all of which say the same thing. He drowned himself on the last day of December, and though the local authorities dragged the freezing water for days and miles, his body was never found.”

— M.L. Rio