Top 180 M.L. Rio Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Once upon a time, us.”

— M.L. Rio

152. “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

153. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— 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. “Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?” The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it,” I say.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

169. “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

170. “I am myself indifferent honest,” I admitted. “But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.”

— M.L. Rio

171. “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

172. “I am wretched. Destitute.”

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

174. “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

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. “She says, “Were you in love with him?” “Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.”

— M.L. Rio

177. “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

178. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— M.L. Rio

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

— M.L. Rio

185. “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