Top 40 Sophie Mackintosh Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

2. “Mother often talks about the possibility that one day we will kill her in her sleep, if we don’t cause her death indirectly from a heart attack, because daughters are hard-wired for betrayal. How we feel about this statement varies.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

3. “One day I looked at my husband and I thought, Would you knock them down? Would you stand up with your arms raised if they came for me? Coming for me was a thing I considered often, though the ‘they’ was hazy, it changed all the time. Once I had thought this bad thought, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought it when he was asleep and I was awake. No, I realized one day. He would lie down and let them.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

4. “Sometimes she was my enemy and sometimes she was just my mother, an enemy in a different way.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

5. “Love always asks you to sacrifice something, I know that now.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

6. “The forest looms. It is dark in here, dark where I belong, with the wolves and the snakes and the other loveless creatures.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

7. “He spoke of bodies grown strong despite the toxic air, men like trees grown against the wind, knotted, warped. Some thrived on the poison; it was like their bodies had learned not just to overcome, but to need it.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

8. “The world has not been kind to him, I can tell, yet he loves it anyway. It is a man’s place. His survival is implicit, a survival taken for granted.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

9. “Step always with caution. The body is the purest sort of alarm. If something feels wrong, it probably is.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

10. “Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

11. “Crying lays you low and vulnerable, racks your body. If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort. It has absorbed our pain and is dangerous to let loose.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

12. “Do not enter. Viewed from another angle, Do not leave.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

13. “It’s important, the knowledge that things could always be worse. Imagining them gone makes the edges of my love sharper.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

14. “I would take my strange and incapable heart out of my chest if I could, display it, absolve myself of responsibility.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

15. “The world is only ever one breach away from being unpeeled entirely, one tragedy, one glimpse behind the curtain.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

16. “I have always been afraid of her ability to pull the rug out from underneath us, her capacity for cruelty and kindness in the same sentence, same action.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

17. “It’s the men who don’t even know themselves that wish you harm – those are the most dangerous ones. They will have you cower in the name of love, and feel sentimental about it. They’re the ones who hate women the most.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

18. “It is Sky who saves us. It will always be a woman who saves us, we know that now. The protections of men are only ever flimsy and self-serving.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

19. “I have always been afraid of her ability to pull the rug out from underneath us, her capacity for cruelty and kindness in the same sentence, same action. I can see it in Grace too. It must be a prerequisite for being a mother, something that growing another person inside you does, heart and heartlessness, as though simplistic empathy has been scooped out and replaced with something more fundamental, something more likely to guarantee survival.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

20. “Part of what made the old world so terrible, so prone to destruction, was a total lack of preparation for the personal energies often called feelings. Mother told us about these kinds of energies. Especially dangerous for women, our bodies already so vulnerable in ways that the bodies of men are not. It was a wonder that there were still safe places, islands like ours where women can be healthful and whole.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

21. “The supple water is forever changing. It’s almost like it never happened, which gives me hope that one day it will be like it never happened.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

22. “The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

23. “Mother discussed with us the importance of examining every action of our bodies. Step always with caution. The body is the purest sort of alarm. If something feels wrong, it probably is.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

24. “Midsummer of the year I ran away, Lia and I had discovered we liked to tan with our tops off in the old greenhouse. It was ripe with oxygen. Smashed pots everywhere. We dragged cushions from our own bedrooms to lie on, and opened up the panels in the glass roof for air. We were closed in but it was our own decision, for once. The glossy leaves of abandoned foliage sheltered our bodies. We had not yet learned that they were shameful.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

25. “Everybody knew and nobody helped. It was the secret that we were all choking on. Even my mother, my sisters, my aunt’s. They passed it around. They said, with their eyes, why should you escape it? What makes you better than us? Can’t you see our hearts have been bleeding for years?”

— Sophie Mackintosh

26. “If we were to spit at them, they would spit back harder. We expected that – we were prepared for it even. What we didn’t expect was their growing outrage that we even dared to have moisture in our mouths. Then outrage that we had mouths at all. They would have liked us all dead, I know that now.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

27. “She was just like every other woman. Eager and tender-hearted. That knot of grief in her chest begging to be undone.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

28. “I’ve been looked at in pity and in fear and I’ve learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

29. “Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

30. “There is a violence to our eulogizing. We are making something of you that you never consented to. We are turning you into something else: a man finally overcome by the world. I know you would not want to be remembered that way. Thinking about you is akin to dragging your bloated ghost to shore. And why would we want to keep bringing that back?”

— Sophie Mackintosh

31. “Llew puts the lid down without comment, pushes the stool back. There is a fluidity to his movements, despite his size, that tells me he has never had to fold himself into s hidden thing, and I wonder what that must be like, to know his body is irreproachable.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

32. “Sometimes my life felt like a faulty experiment. I followed all the instructions and yet I did not turn out to be the person I should have been.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

33. “I invite the confessionals of men. I am not a stranger to them. Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

34. “All my life I’ve been told I can only be complete if I grow something inside of me and bring it into the world. Whereas you are whole and perfect as you are.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

35. “I wondered if motherhood held such appeal for me because it was a masochism you couldn’t ever let go of.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

36. “Every time I think “I am very lonely,” it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

37. “Love as a protest within my body. Or perhaps it’s just that I am unused to touch, am out of practice. Bodies do not lie. This all acts as proof that he has touched me here, here, here.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

38. “What must it be like, to live in a world that wants to kill you? Where every breath is an affront?”

— Sophie Mackintosh

39. “Love... also taught me that loss is a thing that builds around you. That what feels like safety is often just absence of current harm, and those two things are not the same.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

40. “Easy to be friendly when you want something,” she tells her. “See if you think they’re so friendly when they’re cutting your throat.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

41. “The mark my body has left on his is fading already. My whole strength has barely any effect. My anger cannot touch him, cannot even be taken seriously.”

— Sophie Mackintosh

42. “I don’t know what this love is capable of, but as I study his face – angles, the soft curl of lips, his eyes closed now – I believe it could do anything.”

— Sophie Mackintosh