Top 150 Mona Awad Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Crack running through his voice like a crack in a glass. Eyes still on my eyes. A sorrow there, fathoms deep. His sorrow or mine? I’m drowning in it like dark water.”

— Mona Awad

55. “Because you simply can’t sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal man of your own creation and say nothing. You can’t. And say nothing? That would be just wrong, on so many levels.”

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Mona Awad

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Mona Awad

68. “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

69. “I walk toward what I think is the school, getting lost again and again until at last the moldering, vacant storefronts switch to juice bars and dog salons and I glimpse the Ivy Bubble. The towers upon which Ava and I have sat like gargoyles. Everyone on the street suddenly goes from looking like an extra in a zombie movie to the star of a French New Wave film.”

— 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. “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

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

— Mona Awad

73. “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

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

— Mona Awad

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

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

— Mona Awad

78. “God this is depressing, Ava says. And boring. Aren’t you bored? It’s what I can afford, I tell her. Because even if she’s not here, I might as well talk to her all the same.”

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

80. “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

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

— Mona Awad

82. “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

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

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

85. “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

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

— Mona Awad

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “Probably you have visited the Falls of Falling. For like an hour, a half day, a day and night tops, you parked in event parking, even though there is no event there but water.”

— Mona Awad

92. “Normally Fosco adores Caroline’s pieces, fragmented narratives involving anxious young women who clearly have never had jobs, who instead brood through afternoonish times of day, think quirky thoughts, bake, and are wistful.”

— Mona Awad

93. “It dawns on me that perhaps this isn’t a gesture of kindness and trust at all, it’s a test. Or worse, a way to humiliate me. To show me that they are the ones who have this gift, not me. Not you, Samantha. Sorry. This ability comes with being us. We inherited it, like our summer houses, our grand pianos, our perfect, nuanced taste.”

— Mona Awad

94. “Then the light goes out. A wind comes. The curtains catch fire. The bunny explodes.”

— Mona Awad

95. “That’s just what you think you saw,” Victoria says.”

— Mona Awad

96. “We asked you to come out for bento boxes and you said, No, no, I’m too busy and important and better than you are for bento boxes.”

— Mona Awad

97. “Now remind me what is it you’re working on?” As if she had ever remembered it enough to forget.”

— Mona Awad

98. “Though he has no real innate charisma, he’s tall enough that if he declares mutiny, they will all follow.”

— Mona Awad

99. “Mother’s lawyer. When I was younger, he reminded me a little of a perverted Rumpelstiltskin. I’d watch him ogle Mother. Take her all in with a twinkly eyed delight I found obscene, like she was a bowl of bright, erotic candy.”

— Mona Awad

100. “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