Top 160 Mona Awad Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Mona Awad

103. “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

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

— Mona Awad

105. “I have consumed more punch. I have forgotten that I am a twenty-five-year-old woman. The heart Rob Valencia holds in his hand is a seventeen-year-old heart, warped and badly drawn with purple ink. It is Samantha Heather Mackey’s seventeen-year-old idea of her heart. And it has Rob Valencia’s name drawn inside in jagged, bleedy letters.”

— Mona Awad

106. “I have no dirty mysterious life. I have no life. If only you knew how empty and boring my hours were last year. Maybe I should just go.”

— Mona Awad

107. “There was never anything to fear. Which is a little disappointing, frankly. Maybe I wanted to be obliterated.”

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

109. “She hands me a dress patterned all over with little beheaded girls with blond beehive hairdos, their smiling heads floating next to their decapitated bodies. “Marie Antoinettes,” she says.”

— Mona Awad

110. “A pause so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again.”

— Mona Awad

111. “Because it is that time of day where we thank each other for breathing.”

— Mona Awad

112. “He kisses me on the lips. Just once. So light, like a touch of a touch. This time it doesn’t burn. It burns, yes, but not in a bad way. It’s like that wrong heaven of stars up there are all in my body now. Little dots of fiery light. But it doesn’t feel wrong anymore. It feels exactly right. Just like the right heaven.”

— Mona Awad

113. “Talking at me about her miserable life while I lie imprisoned on the floor. Pouring it all into me like emotional Drano.”

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

116. “This face says I’ve known joy and pain, known them both. I’ll know them both again.”

— Mona Awad

117. “He looks at me like I’m a black funnel of wind, gathering force. Heading his way.”

— Mona Awad

118. “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

119. “Without the sun, what’s the moon? Just a rock in the outer dark. Its illumination just a trick. Just a trick from the sun’s light, which it steals. And that’s what Beauty is too.”

— Mona Awad

120. “I think of that spring morning, just before dawn. how she appeared at my side on the bench. how I felt so suddenly alive with possibility. saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person I knew in my bones would be someone I’d love. how I had no idea. how the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing. maybe I could do it again. Imagine her back. live on the roofs and trees of my mind with another her beside me forever. take her mesh hand in mine and this time never let go.”

— Mona Awad

121. “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

122. “Like a roaring in your head turned off. The beauty of the sudden silence. The miracle of lightness when you have lived so heavy.”

— Mona Awad

123. “The mothers always look around the campus like extremely interested buyers, their jeweled hands rubbing the backs of their fawnlike spawn as if to say: This could be yours, this could be yours.”

— Mona Awad

124. “So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.”

— Mona Awad

125. “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

126. “Their hair grew shinier and longer, their eyes red, and I did not know which small hand belonged to which pink-and-white body, which coo came from which glossy mouth, which fingers were getting tangled in my hair. And then a voice like warm fur, her balmy lips very close to my ear. Go outside and bring us a bunny, Samantha.”

— Mona Awad

127. “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

128. “There is something loathsome about her intensity, her passion, I can’t deny it. The depth and breadth of it – how fiercely it burns under her unassuming skin.”

— Mona Awad

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

— Mona Awad

130. “I get it, Samantha. Books, they’re like old friends. When I was here this summer, I carried four or five with me all the time.”

— Mona Awad

131. “They break whoever they touch, Ms Fitch. Your Bank, your bones, your spirit.”

— Mona Awad

132. “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

133. “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven. Remember this, remember this.”

— Mona Awad

134. “I listen to overwritten descriptions of staring deeply into a bonfire on a Costa Rican shore. Of getting pretend-lost in a labyrinthine garden with oh so many nooks and twists. Of being existential in LA, New York, but really, obviously, being rich. And content. And unalone.”

— Mona Awad

135. “At the grocery store that evening, I weave the cart dancingly, lightly, between the aisles. Standing on my tiptoes. Standing on my heels. Sometimes jumping up on the cart, letting it sail with the forward momentum of my body. Letting one foot dangle off the edge. So fun. I say hello to all the shoppers I pass.”

— Mona Awad

136. “Sucking his admiration like marrow from the veal bones she used to enjoy with parsley and salt.”

— Mona Awad

137. “Or sometimes my mother would come in with me and sit there, watch me change into and out of things. It looks fine, she’d say. She said that every time except once, when she turned away, attempting to mask her disgust at the sight of the fresh mess of red stretch marks across my stomach. Even though she had the same marks on her own stomach, she couldn’t bear seeing them on me. Hadn’t she tried, in her way, to spare me from inheriting her fate? I can still see them now in the mirror, faded.”

— Mona Awad

138. “She says it’s like you have Leonard Cohen’s touch with lyrics coupled with Daniel Johnston’s sincerity coupled with a Rimbaudian aura of tragedy but with Nick Cave teeth.”

— Mona Awad

139. “If I had beauty, I decided then, I would never throw it away. I would never give it up.”

— Mona Awad

140. “Likely you left Falling after the waterfall selfie and didn’t look back. Maybe on the way out you bought an overpriced shot glass, or a mug like this one. Or a magnet with a Falls pic better than the ones you took. Perhaps it’s getting struck by a rainbow. I’m Falling for You. My mom gave me one that said that once, as a joke. I took it with me everywhere. Put it on every fridge I’ve ever had since, even this one. This summer I gave it to Ava, who put it on her fridge. Our fridge, she said. I.”

— Mona Awad

141. “She looks so lonely. Lovely.”

— Mona Awad

142. “But I doubt you did any of those things unless you have a mullet or a deep sense of irony.”

— Mona Awad

143. “The Duchess breathes in deeply, then exhales slowly with eyes closed, the way my old therapist did. The one my father sent me to when I was a teenager, after my mother died.”

— Mona Awad

144. “A single room on the west side, which I really thought was just fine even though it didn’t quite pass my suicide visualization test. Could I picture shooting myself here? Definitely I could. Hanging myself? Sure. Some nights, I could even see the noose swinging from the light fixture on the ceiling. But I figured with a few well-placed posters, I might mute the sound of my own future death cry that would sometimes flood my ears upon entering this single room with galley kitchen.”

— Mona Awad

145. “The cut of his face and the cut of his dark suit and the cut of his shadows. The scar’s jagged shape gleaming in the bloody sunset.”

— Mona Awad

146. “I mean, we all have our dark days. Very dark days, sometimes. When our demons come out to play. No one lives entirely in the light, right?”

— Mona Awad

147. “Now I see his leonine face fall slightly at the sight of students with whom he must fraternize. Ask about their summers. Their writing. Did they get their stipend checks okay? And then there’s the fact that I’m one of the students. Makes it much more difficult. But he smiles. Of course he does. It’s his job.”

— Mona Awad

148. “September. Warren University. The Narrative Arts department’s annual welcome back Demitasse, because this school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party.”

— Mona Awad

149. “All about to be sold by Tad. Handsome young Tad, who has no idea of death or loss.”

— Mona Awad

150. “What I smell is the word forbidden, red and sharp and bittersweet, rising up like crushed roses under the bed.”

— Mona Awad