Top 160 Mona Awad Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Her head against his shoulder, her eyes closed, her lips parted and blissful. He’s chewing on her peach spaghetti strap. His eyes are open but vacant. When he sees me watching, the strap drops from his mouth. Then he picks it back up again and starts chewing. His eyes have a glazed, contented look to them.”

— Mona Awad

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “The night is a waterfall of music and lights. The night is a rabbit hole into which we enter, hand in mesh hand. The night is a dark earth I could dig my hands into forever. The night becomes a page of literature that I would, at sixteen, press against my heart.”

— Mona Awad

58. “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

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

— Mona Awad

60. “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

61. “She turned up the cherubic harp music. Each song is twenty minutes long and meanders like a bitchy cat. The woman’s high folksy voice hurts our teeth but we would never tell Bunny this. We said we loved this song. So much. But Bunny wasn’t listening. Bunny was singing along in her own high voice. Cherubic harp music is her very, very favorite.”

— Mona Awad

62. “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

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

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

66. “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

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

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “You were such a lonely little girl, weren’t you? Whispering to grass. Befriending sticks. Dreaming yourself into movies and books. Every screen, every page, like a door to another world, remember?”

— Mona Awad

74. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

80. “And I let her go, let her leave, just sat there in a kitten dress, watching her say, I’m leaving. Gave her no words to come back by, no words to come back for. Just sat there with my mouth open, all my words still inside.”

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Mona Awad

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “Smilingly oblivious to the fact that they are in the mouth of hell. Or as Ava and I call it, the Lair of Cthulhu. Cthulhu is a giant squid monster invented by a horror writer who went insane and died here. And you know what, it makes sense.”

— Mona Awad

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “My in-box floods, as it did last summer, with alarming crime-alert messages from campus security. Shooting in the early evening. Sodomy in the morning. Decapitation at 3:30 in the afternoon. I wonder when is a nonbeheading time to go out and buy ginger ale.”

— Mona Awad

96. “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

97. “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

98. “They’ve pulled apart from one another at last, their twee dresses not even rumpled. Their shiny heads of hair not even disturbed. Their skins glowing with health insurance as they all crouch down in unison to collectively coo at a professor’s ever jumping shih tzu.”

— Mona Awad

99. “She is a sleek, beautiful young woman, younger looking even than her twenty-eight years, except maybe around the eyes. Even though he himself has borne witness to her transformation over the past three years, he is still getting used to the severely pared-down point of her chin, the now visible web of bones in her throat, how all the once-soft edges of her have suddenly grown knife sharp. How they seem pointed at him in perpetual, quiet accusation.”

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad