Top 40 Marie-Helene Bertino Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Life has no past tense: To remember something is to relive it.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

2. “They hurt me, these small, brutal kindnesses.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

3. “We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, man, either way we can’t escape.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

4. “There are intimacies that don’t involve marriage just as there are marriages that don’t involve intimacy. The mind provides the only possible privacy so what is more intimate than thought? If intimacy is marriage, I’m married to anyone I’ve carried in my mind.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

5. “A monkey could do my job better and with more hilarious results.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

6. “The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

7. “I’m a minor character in my own life.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

8. “If there were a race among all artists to the human heart, my money would be on music to win. It knows a shortcut.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

9. “A schedule is a gift we give children so when they are adults they can deal with the anxiety of loss.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

10. “You can’t say you know a city unless you know three ways to everywhere.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

11. “That’s a drummer’s love story. If you want a prettier one, you’ll be waiting forever. If you could separate your body into four distinct rhythms, you’d be cracked too.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

12. “Dogs, she faxes, are the best we can do.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

13. “She tries to make her voice tender enough to hold his anger and her hope.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

14. “Being physically present in one place while your mind is in another is loneliness.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

15. “Adina is surprised and pleased to receive this word. A human explanation for it all along! She wonders what other rational human qualities she wrote off as extraterrestrial because of a human’s tendency to other what they don’t understand.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

16. “Adina hasn’t experienced romantic love like the ones portrayed in movies, or a more realistic love like the ones portrayed in more realistic movies. But to love a mother who grew alongside her. A friend when she left the Earth. To love a dog. To love vocation.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

17. “The way that woman walked, like she was paying the sidewalk a favor.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

18. “Husband. Boyfriend. People want them so much but I can’t understand what they’re supposed to do. They take so much energy.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

19. “People with money list what they did without. Poor people list what they had.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

20. “If you are anything other than humbled in the presence of love, you are not in the presence of love.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

21. “What a human in a dark room who has lost the ability to see themselves or others does not need is a metaphor. More effective would be to say, If you feel alone, you are. I’m sorry I cannot join you in that dark space but I won’t offend you with a metaphor. Yet. Grief is a bad mirror. It shows you manipulated images of yourself, your will, and the future. It cannot show you how the small work you do will add up to yourself. Inch by inch.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

22. “Anyone questioning whether god exists need only consider the brevity of a dog’s life span. If there was a god, let alone a benevolent one, dogs would have life spans similar to parrots.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

23. “She doesn’t realize how anxiety influences her posture, voice, the heaviness of her footsteps, the length of time it takes her to leave the car in the driveway at the end of the workday, so that even before she enters the apartment Adina knows her mother’s mood.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

24. “Madeleine stares through the window into the courtyard. On most days she feels something staring back: a God or a mother-shaped benevolent force. Today, nothing reciprocates. The streamers on the chained bicycles lift in the indifferent breeze. She is alone in old stockings she’s repaired twice but still run. Life will be nothing but errands and gray nights.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

25. “Hobbies are a way of staying present so humans do not have to think about death.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

26. “Red wine tastes like a dark-walled library and white wine smells like a woman looking away.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

27. “Misogyny, like Roman Catholicism, is an institution built on faith. It has hierarchy, jokes, language, periodicals. Its believers insist on a theory with no proof. With proof to the contrary, even. Built into the system of maintaining the status quo is an ingenious method of casting aspersions on nonbelievers, and reasons why the “proof” must remain unseen.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

28. “Even the word itself, human, means flawed. It means everything is technically correct but some unanticipated trouble has fouled it up. If the assignment had been to be human, to fail, then I succeeded. But if it was to create a comprehensive document of life on Earth, I was always doomed. Language is pitiable when weighed against experience.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

29. “Seeing his face after months was as immediate as a pointed gun.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

30. “The light does not dim and continues to travel.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

31. “I will have thousands upon thousands of days and this is merely one of them. This thought brings relief.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

32. “Mother shelving important parts of herself into places even she’ll forget.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

33. “When humans enjoy themselves they no longer feel the passage of time. They forget the constraints or failures of their physical bodies.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

34. “To reach the end of your life and wish you had time for a few other roads – what could be more human?”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

35. “Language is pitiable when weighed against experience.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

36. “Madeleine has never had a caramel apple and she wants to taste one more than she wants God’s love.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

37. “If she believed the boardwalk T-shirts, a woman was a ball or chain, someone stupid you’re with, someone to lie to so a man can drink beer. If she believed television fathers, women were a constant pain, wanting red roses or a nice dinner out. If she learned how to be a girl from songs, it was worse. If she learned from other girls, worse still.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

38. “When someone dies, where does the way they eat egg rolls go?”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

39. “Human beings, Adina faxes, did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

40. “They cannot afford to be smart with money.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

41. “When you’re alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

42. “Eyes are another commonly fetishized part of the human body. The seeing parts. But once they were only pockets of sensitive atoms on the foreheads of primordial fish. Sightless skin that yearned to make something fantastic out of light.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

43. “Some years age you and some make you young.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

44. “If when I explain human behavior you insist on logic, we won’t get far.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino

45. “The heavy thud of the front door closing. He leaves the phone on the desk. The hallway is dark and long and empty. “Louisa?” His voice echoes against the walls as if he is asking himself her name.”

— Marie-Helene Bertino