Top 70 Maria Dahvana Headley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m dark matter. The universe inside of me is full of something, and science can’t even shine a light on it. I feel like I’m mostly made of mysteries.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

2. “Like we’re here, and at the same time, in outer space. Which of course, we are. We’re all untethered, all flying around in the dark, the same as Mars and Venus, the same as the stars.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

3. “Carpe omnia,” I say. Not carpe diem. Not Seize the Day. No, this says Seize Everything. I’ll.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

4. “The world isn’t large enough for heroes and monsters at once. There’s too much danger of confusion between the two categories.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

5. “Adults want to talk about death way less than people my age do. Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away. Big bag over the shoulder, climbing up the chimney carrying everything in a person’s life, and taking off, eight-reindeered, from the roof.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

6. “You don’t really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

7. “We all know a boy can’t daddy until his daddy’s dead.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

8. “Living’s a risk, Aza,” she says sharply. “Heroes die young. Would you choose to be less than a hero? Here, the sky will light with fire for you. Our funerals are their sunsets.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

9. “I call death onto those who don’t know a child when they see a child. Men who think they made the world out of clay and turned it into their safe place, men who think a woman wouldn’t flip the universe over and flatten them beneath it. I have enough bullets for all of them.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

10. “Every life starts with the same beginning and ends with the same end. The rest is the story, even if you don’t understand it, even if you aren’t sure which parts are true and which parts are your brain trying to make sense out of smoke.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

11. “Life and death aren’t as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn’t like walking into a new country. This is like walking into a new room in the same house. This is like sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there’s a glass wall between.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

12. “Do you think sixty-five-year-old women don’t go to war? We are always at war. Our husbands spent their lives in comfortable chairs. Have we ever sat in comfortable chairs? No. Yoga balls, haunches tensed.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

13. “Maybe every monster is a miracle meant to change the world.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

14. “I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

15. “They were the cream of the crop, but soon they’d be chaff, scythed from swordsmen into skeletons.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

16. “Children are better at feeding monsters than adults are. They don’t have the burden of suspicion.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

17. “Why is she here at Herot Hall, where at any second something bad could come down the mountain, or tunnel up from below? Monsters. There’s a whole world filled with monsters. They everywhere.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

18. “My thing is a Mystery and not just a Mystery, but Bermuda – no sun, only Triangle. Unknowable. Unsolvable.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

19. “But who’s ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe?”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

20. “Sa nu pierzi vremea cat esti in viata, sa-i saruti pe oamenii pe care trebuie sa-i saruti si sa-i iubesti pe oamenii pe care trebuie sa-i iubesti.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

21. “I like the sky. It’s rational to me in a way that life isn’t. Looking at it doesn’t suck the way you might think it would, given all the dying-girl-stares-at-heaven possibilities. I don’t think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

22. “People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

23. “I feel my strange, beautiful bird in my heart, and the unflooded world all around me.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

24. “Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

25. “I can’t imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

26. “It’s water from beneath the mountain, and its full of of the taste of bones and rocks. She’s bought five cases of bottled to keep from having to serve this, even in ice-cube format. There’s something awful about it. It feels full of ghosts.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

27. “She runs her tongue over her teeth as she walks out the door, and feels an edge, something needing to be filed down before she bites her tongue. Dentist. Manicure. Makeup. Hair salon. She tastes blood, swallows it, pops a mint into her mouth. Small repairs. There’s no woman alive who hasn’t found the occasional hole in heaven, and carefully, meticulously, covered it back up.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

28. “But there was no version of my life in which I wasn’t getting my ass to Svalbard.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

29. “I’m this thing that emerged from it, some kind of miserable Phoenix.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

30. “If you look at the sky that way, it’s this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

31. “They’ll never forgive me, except they love me, so they will.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

32. “Once upon a time, he was the child of some other mother, and his beloved was a wonder of the world.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

33. “She looks up at the mountain and wonders which god answered her prayers, wonders if she prayed them.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

34. “Each of them, living, was intolerable to the other, and in fury, they fell to it.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

35. “Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

36. “You hold no horrors for me.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

37. “The world is full of worse than anyone has yet imagined, and there’s only so much room.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

38. “Forever isn’t always something one would choose, given all the information.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

39. “Yes, I’m a reader. Kill me. I could tell you I was raised in the library and the books were my only friends, but I didn’t do that, did I? Because I have mercy. I’m neither a genius nor a kid destined to become a wizard. I’m just me. I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

40. “Inside the mountain, inside the train, one boy kisses the other, and the other kisses him back, and there is nothing but history between them, and history is enough to make a future.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

41. “Half of the dead are killed by their friends. Maybe that’s the history of everything.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

42. “Famous people aren’t magic. Despite their thoughts to the contrary.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

43. “Looping. Some days are so dark I can’t see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

44. “I thumb. There’s a flying alien witch. Awesome.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

45. “The Playwright was excited in the way a child is excited on Christmas morning. I liked this. Most people didn’t get excited about anything other than their own discontent.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

46. “I like the sky. It’s rational to me in a way that life isn’t.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

47. “For years, I thought that if I had to be a palindrome, make me kuulilennuteetunneliluuk.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

48. “You’ve never seen surprise until you’ve looked into the eyes of an ascending bovine.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

49. “I think about curses and pirates. Skeletons guarding booby-trapped hideaways.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

50. “Wonders have been born before. Sometimes they’ve been worshipped. There’ve been new things over and over, and some creatures have fallen groaning to the ground and others have learned to fly.”

— Maria Dahvana Headley