Top 150 Mona Awad Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I swallow. My hands ungrip the cliff. Trust. I will not fall, I will float. Up into their high blue sky full of fluffy clouds and rainbows. Up, up, up into the pink mist and the laughing light.”

— Mona Awad

52. “How amazing would that be? Each of us flushed and grinning in the spinning dark of our own overturned world.”

— Mona Awad

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Mona Awad

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Mona Awad

60. “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

61. “Disorientation can be a very interesting space to occupy as a writer, Samantha. You should try it as an exercise over the holidays. It could be quite illuminating for you, I think.”

— Mona Awad

62. “I tell them how he was old-school Spanish Catholic and his family slaughtered goats in the backyard. So he always smelled sort of biblical. Like incense and roasted flesh.”

— Mona Awad

63. “The roses are swaying gently around me in an ocean breeze. I can smell them from here. I can hear the waves and I can hear the chimes making a lovely music. I’m smiling at myself with my very red lips. I’m telling myself it’s time to go.”

— Mona Awad

64. “It makes us feel a little like God. No, we can’t go that far. In fact, we are a little fearful of God right now, if he’s out there. She, Bunny. If She’s out there. Or It. We like to think of It more as an energy. And don’t worry, It would approve. So approve. Of us. Because look at what we just did. Look at him.”

— Mona Awad

65. “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven.”

— Mona Awad

66. “The pink pony inside me weeps softly.”

— Mona Awad

67. “The truth is, if you go to Warren, no matter what is going on in your personal life – hair trouble, existential malaise, ax murder – you do the reading.”

— Mona Awad

68. “I bite”, Ava says, sliding out of the booth. “It’s a terrible, voluntary affliction”.”

— Mona Awad

69. “So I’ll be honest with you. In this story, I don’t look that good, except for maybe my skin, which Mel claims she would kill for. Also my tits. Mel says they’re huge and she assures me it’s a good thing.”

— Mona Awad

70. “Warren was founded in 1775 and over here – Blah, blah, BLAH, finishes Ava on the bench beside me. What he’s not telling you is that there are people right here on campus who will chop your head off, she shouts to the mothers, who look at her, appalled. That’s right. With an ax! Like this. And then she’ll stand up and take a step toward them with an invisible ax over her shoulder and one or some or all of them will scream. Though I’m horrified, I laugh until I cry every time.”

— Mona Awad

71. “Behind the blob, I notice another Darling lurking in the corner. He has a wooden spoon in one hand and a hammer in the other. Chefarpenter, because they couldn’t decide if he should be a chef or a carpenter.”

— Mona Awad

72. “We think of it as art meets life, Bunny. We’re putting art into the world.”

— Mona Awad

73. “The only journey that matters in the end, Daughter of Noelle.” “Retinol?” I whisper. “The soul. A journey of the soul, of course.”

— Mona Awad

74. “Maybe just a trick of the light.”

— Mona Awad

75. “It’s the hour when all the shop mannequins conspire to look menacing. When they all appear to be smirking a little. The mannequins always reminded me of mother. Flawless, white, smiling.”

— Mona Awad

76. “The light from her stolen lamp buzzing over her feathery head like a flickering motel sign. Sipping champagne from a wide-mouthed flute. Where does she get it? Never mind. Places. Ava never seems to worry about money. Yet somehow her apartment is like a movie of arty poverty in Paris. Run-down but chicly so.”

— Mona Awad

77. “Ice still on the windshield. Trucks roaring past like laughing devils.”

— Mona Awad

78. “When she repeats the word, the lilt in her tone suggests its aptness in my case. Perhaps, Samantha, you are lost in more ways than one?”

— Mona Awad

79. “In my memory of this time, I sit looking bored out the window onto the most beautiful, serene stretch of the world left to look at, not even seeing it. Wearing a string of pearls that, the first time they were clasped around my neck, felt like strangling but after a week felt like nothing at all.”

— Mona Awad

80. “Sometimes we wish for terrible things, things we deserve. How could we not wish for them when we deserve them? And sometimes the heavens hear us. Something hears us. And our wishes come true. Should we feel guilty? Of course we shouldn’t feel guilty, why guilty? Why guilty when we deserve it, when maybe, just maybe, it’s a question of justice?”

— Mona Awad

81. “Don’t trade one kind of blindness for another.”

— Mona Awad

82. “They’re graduate students, I argue back. Exactly. Hiding from life in the most coddling, insular, and self-aggrandizing way.”

— Mona Awad

83. “Because at Warren, the Body is all the rage. As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material.”

— Mona Awad

84. “Here at Mini they have many cupcakes in mini but they should have more. Why don’t they have more? They should have more in mini, more! We tell them how they should have more in mini and they do not seem to make a note of it.”

— Mona Awad

85. “Even with my skin and tits, though, it’s still Mel who looks better. She’s got psoriasis and a mustache she has to bleach and still. It’s definitely Mel who has any hope in hell with any of the boys we like.”

— Mona Awad

86. “She used to tell you fairy tales at night, remember? Once upon a time. When you were a sad, dreamy little girl. Each night you lay in your princess bed, surrounded by your glassy-eyed dolls, waiting for her like a wish.”

— Mona Awad

87. “Close my eyes. Let the night become dawn. Let the snow outside fall and fall like it will bury us. Please bury us. It would be totally fine by me.”

— Mona Awad

88. “Think whatever you want, think the worst, I dare you.”

— Mona Awad

89. “I look at her lips shiny and thick with so much gloss. There’s a wavering quality to her voice, like a car swerving down a dangerous road.”

— Mona Awad

90. “Until all my words had spilled to the floor. I was too drunk to pick them up. So leave them there.”

— Mona Awad

91. “The universe is against us, which makes sense. So we get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while.”

— Mona Awad

92. “Because life is shorter than we are, she says, so why beat around the bush?”

— Mona Awad

93. “Reminding myself what an opportunity it is to be here, that this school opens doors, so many doors, surely it does, doesn’t it? That I came here because they give you the most funding, the most time to write, both of which I desperately needed. Neither of which I really had when I was working as a bookstore wench, a waitress, an office wench, a waitress again – the only jobs I could seem to get with my English degree.”

— Mona Awad

94. “We huddle-hug on the velvety green among the cherry blossom trees. We link arms. We close our eyes the better to feel each other’s bodies. We form a hot little circle of love and understanding. We press our faces into our faces, our cheeks against our cheeks, our eyelashes tickling our skins like little hummingbird wings, like Bunny nose twitches.”

— Mona Awad

95. “In my memory, those years remain my most prolific writing period although I’ve never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another.”

— Mona Awad

96. “I am a boring tree murderess.”

— Mona Awad

97. “A desperate desire to escape this saccharine embrace coursing through me.”

— Mona Awad

98. “I can’t believe you’re here,” I hear myself say in a voice that does not sound like my voice. It is a voice filled with twinkly stars, with overly lashed cartoon eyes.”

— Mona Awad

99. “I look at the dress. It’s got kittens licking ice cream cones all over it. The kittens are wearing slightly askew crowns.”

— Mona Awad

100. “Their bloody faces regarding me so kindly, so openly, that I know this is a friendship moment.”

— Mona Awad