Top 150 Mona Awad Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I miss you, Bunny. This summer was so hard without you. I barely wrote a word, I was so, so sad. Let’s never ever part again, please?” Ava laughs out loud at this. Actually laughs. Throws her feathery head back. Doesn’t bother to cover her mouth with her gloved hand. It’s a delicious, raucous sound. Ringing in the air like the evening’s missing music.”

— Mona Awad

2. “But I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t stopping. Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination.”

— Mona Awad

3. “We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.”

— Mona Awad

4. “A song I used to hate that I loved surround-sounds my soul. It is a song about nightmares dressed as daydreams, about trading your soul for a kiss. I think not this song, never this song, but my soul is already singing along, riding its swells like an ocean wave, shimmering.”

— Mona Awad

5. “The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.”

— Mona Awad

6. “Envy is when you hate someone because they have something you want, she said simply.”

— Mona Awad

7. “He called me dark, twisted, and mean.” “How sweet. He’s in love.”

— Mona Awad

8. “Then, Beowulf says wistfully, “Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.”

— Mona Awad

9. “She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once.”

— Mona Awad

10. “We all fall, Ms. Fitch. We fall and we rise. Bones and tissue heal. But sometimes we want to hold on to the pain. Sometimes we have our reasons for not being able to let go.”

— Mona Awad

11. “Or is it our amazingly empathic hive mind that we make by hugging so that we become one of those animals with a brain and heart in each tentacle that connects to a bigger, cosmic heart-brain that is like a shared, all-seeing third eye? Who knows? Who cares?”

— Mona Awad

12. “Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.”

— Mona Awad

13. “The way she says alone makes it sound like a cave. Like some hideous, dark cave whose oozing walls are teeming with all the unpleasant things of this world, and I am crawling willingly, brazenly, into this awful space of my own free will. Shoveling the vermin I find scuttling across the floor into my mouth for sustenance.”

— Mona Awad

14. “She is always there, always ready, always on time, like only the truly mediocre are.”

— Mona Awad

15. “Death,” she says, “is just another door, Daughter, we must remember. Your mother,” she sighs, “was making such progress. A shame to lose her. But she did go the way of roses.” She smiles sadly. “Surely that’s a consolation.”

— Mona Awad

16. “Like we could hug and hug and hug until our ribs crack and our hearts burst and our lungs collapse and our arms break off and still. We’d still be hugging air. No body.”

— Mona Awad

17. “I’d spend hours hunting for something – anything – that would render me moderately fuckable. And if not fuckable, something in which I could grieve over the fact of not being fuckable with unbaubled dignity. I.”

— Mona Awad

18. “Can I take your coat?” Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.”

— Mona Awad

19. “Some tell you, “Oh, whatever feels good”. But nothing ever feels good, does it?”

— Mona Awad

20. “When I look back at her, shes staring up at the moon, smiling serenely at it like the moon is her new best friend...”

— Mona Awad

21. “If she did ask, I would say it was grief. The deepest grief. I know she would accept that as an answer. No one knows what’s inside grief. Anything at all can be there.”

— Mona Awad

22. “Mother will carry me in the red wave, and in the wave, we’ll talk. I’ll ask her, Why did you leave me? I’ll tell her a lot of things seem to be leaving me, even myself. But I’m glowing, just like you did.”

— Mona Awad

23. “Why are you apologizing, Samantha?” Creepy Doll says, her breathy voice full of demonic emoticons flanked by winking smileys.”

— Mona Awad

24. “A silence so profound it’s noise. White noise. Beneath which I hear laughter.”

— Mona Awad

25. “Our mothers always said to look hard at the things of this world that are owies on the eyes because they will put more colors in your inner rainbow.”

— Mona Awad

26. “Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation.”

— Mona Awad

27. “It starts to rain. Hard. Because that’s the kind of weather that follows this kind of girl. She’s so slutty and dark she makes the clouds slutty and dark too. Pregnant with this dirty rain that starts to fall hard on both of us.”

— Mona Awad

28. “She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.”

— Mona Awad

29. “But I will not be manipulated or distracted or manipulated. Instead, I look up, right into his eyes whose many swimmy colors drown me.”

— Mona Awad

30. “There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, with dark teeth and shining white pupils glowing in the black sunlight of that other world. – Margaret Atwood.”

— Mona Awad

31. “Didn’t you envy? Didn’t you want? A mirror is only a mirror, Belle. It only ever reflects back what we desire and long for.”

— Mona Awad

32. “The real world lady, it’s out there. Do you even know that? You’re going to have to get back to it sometime.”

— Mona Awad

33. “Saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person I knew in my bones would be someone I’d love.”

— Mona Awad

34. “Temples pressed against temples in a way that made me think of the labial rubbing of the bonobo or the telepathy of beautiful, murderous children in horror films. All eight of their eyes shut tight as if this collective asphyxiation were a kind of religious bliss. All four of their glossy mouths making squealing sounds of monstrous love that hurt my face. I love you, Bunny.”

— Mona Awad

35. “That’s when Rob Valencia’s head explodes. Literally explodes. Blood and brains all over me, the walls. Blood all over the Bunnies and their whimpering boys. Bits of skull falling on the hardwood floor like hail. His headless, suited body remains standing before me. Then it collapses to the floor.”

— Mona Awad

36. “I told you, Cupcake will say, petting her. She’s a freak. Oh, you’re so funny, Bunny. I love you. I love you, Bunny. “Okay,” Ava says, “let’s stop.” “Why?” “You’re obviously not into this tonight.”

— Mona Awad

37. “And that’s when I realize that whatever pain I have, whatever true want that lives under all this greasy, spineless needing to please isn’t something I want to give them.”

— Mona Awad

38. “Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket, but the pastel kind that is used at weddings or tasteful Easter gatherings. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.”

— Mona Awad

39. “Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn’t make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes.”

— Mona Awad

40. “I hope you don’t mind this music,” he says. “No.” I want to take the CD and throw it out the window, possibly setting it on fire first.”

— Mona Awad

41. “Last night seems as unspeakable as money or a fart.”

— Mona Awad

42. “Trixie is now fastening the scarf around my neck like a flaccid noose and I feel my chest getting red and patchy and hot underneath her hands.”

— Mona Awad

43. “Three bunny explosions later, in which the ax gets bloodier and bloodier, the air becoming thick with the scent of dead bunny and boy, Odysseus IV is before us.”

— Mona Awad

44. “He lets go of my face. Becomes Mr. Intensely Sincere. Christian Slater with the bomb in his trench coat pocket. Christian Slater with the baboon heart.”

— Mona Awad

45. “How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you. How alone now.”

— Mona Awad

46. “And I sit there, watching him chomp breadsticks and regard the waterfall sullenly, thinking how there was a time, not too long ago, when with my formerly swollen hands, I could have snapped him in two. A time when I was afraid to lean against him if we were watching TV on the couch because I worried the weight of me was too much. That if I rolled over at night, I’d accidentally crush him to death. It was a ridiculous fear – I was never that big – but it kept me up nights. That and my own hunger.”

— Mona Awad

47. “I try to catch her eye, but it won’t be caught. When at last I see her looking at something close to my direction, I smile. But she looks past me, through me. A guy asks her to dance, and I watch her accept. “Hey,” the man I’m dancing with says. “Ow.” “Sorry.”

— Mona Awad

48. “Being with you,” he says to Ava, “is like being in literature. I have no idea where you’ll lead me next. But I’m excited. My life could change. And I’m not alone anymore.”

— Mona Awad

49. “Because books are dead, Smackey, didn’t you know?”

— Mona Awad

50. “Samantha,” he says, “there is no need at all for eye water.”

— Mona Awad