Top 50 Terese Marie Mailhot Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

2. “My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

3. “I wanted to know what I looked like to you. A sin committed and a prayer answered, you said.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

4. “I preferred abandoned over forsaken – and estranged to abandoned. I loved with abandon. It’s something I still take with me. Estranged is a word with a focus on absence. I can’t afford to think of lack – I’d rather be liberated by it.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

5. “Observation is a skill. Observation isn’t easy, and the right eyes can make me feel like a deer, while the wrong ones make me feel like a monster.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

6. “Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It’s just that people pretend not to see.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

7. “I washed my face again and again and considered that, if you knew more about my pain, I might feel less of it.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

8. “I was not right to want to die. I didn’t want to leave my family. I liked my mind and its potential. I knew the type of burden I was. I was like my mother.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

9. “Every child deserves a type of servitude.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

10. “When you told me that I want too much, I considered how much you take.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

11. “Nobody wants to know why Indian women leave or where they go. Our bodies walk across the highway from the dances of our youth into missing narratives without strobe lights or sweet drinks in our small purses, or the talk of leaving. The truth of our leaving or coming into the world is never told.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

12. “How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

13. “I didn’t know if what I felt was authenticity, or a disease that would overtake me.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

14. “We may not be invisible anymore, but they still want us to disappear.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

15. “I avoid the mysticism of my culture. My people know there is a true mechanism that runs through us. Stars were people in our continuum. Mountains were stories before they were mountains. Things were created by story. The words were conjurers, and ideas were our mothers.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

16. “I learned how to make a honey reduction of the ugly sentences. Still, my voice cracks.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

17. “The way being healed is never real unless every moment of every day you remind yourself of your progress and remind yourself not to go back, or hurt someone, or do the wrong thing – it’s not healing unless you keep moving – you’re never done.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

18. “Every bathroom floor is different, but no mourning I do feels familiar. It feels brand new.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

19. “I’ve exceeded every hope I gave to myself.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

20. “I think it’s dangerous to let go of a transgression when the transgressor is not contrite.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

21. “I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from my heart. It was polarizing to be told there was a diagnosis for the behaviors I felt justified in having.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

22. “Despair isn’t a conduit for love.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

23. “I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

24. “I can hear my aunt’s voice, telling me that if my security depends on a man’s words or action, I’ve lost sight of my power.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

25. “Sometimes I know part of me is still a ghost, walking next to my mother, looking for something to make an offering to, holding her hand. Either this feeling means that part of me is dead, or that she’s alive, somewhere inside of me.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

26. “Our culture is based in the profundity things carry. We’re always trying to see the world the way our ancestors did – we feel less of a relationship to the natural world. There was a time when we dictated our beliefs and told ourselves what was real, or what was wrong or right. There weren’t any abstractions. We knew that our language came before the world.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

27. “You said you would be on the other a side of the door. That’s how perfect love is at first. Solutions are simple and problems are laid out simply.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

28. “In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

29. “My therapists didn’t pity me, not the good ones; they made me strip myself of pandering, manipulation, presentation – they wanted the truth more desperately than I did, and then they wanted me to speak it – live it every moment. I feel like writing is that way. Writing can be hard therapy.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

30. “I realized that love can be mediocre and a safe comfort, or it can be unhinged and hurtful. Either seemed like a good life.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

31. “When did I become enough for you, and what was the distinction? It would help to know what makes me worthwhile, and what doesn’t.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

32. “I felt breathless, like every question was a step up a stairway.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

33. “You think weakness is a problem. I want to be torn apart by everything.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

34. “My people cultivated pain. In a way that god cultivated his garden with the foresight that he could not contain or protect the life within it. Humanity was born out of pain.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

35. “I look for external validations of worth, and I always end up crazy over it,” I said. “It’s good you can acknowledge that,” Terri said. “How long have you been doing that?” “My whole life. Isn’t that what we learn as children? To look for affirmation in the external? Our fathers and mothers?” I said. “Some children are taught self-esteem from a young age,” she said.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

36. “That’s when I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

37. “Today, in front of a slew of white authors, during a fellowship, with a drink in my hand, I said that I was untouchable. There was a gasp, and maybe it was a hundred years of work for my name to arrive here, where I can name my pain so well that people are afraid of the consequences and the power.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

38. “Our boys, their compassion to will away inherited sorrow, it’s what makes them good and mine and Indian.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

39. “You are such a home to me.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

40. “Each child, woman, and man should know a limit of containment. Nobody should be asked to hold more.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

41. “Casey, I want to be polite and present myself as decent. I know the math of regret and nostalgia. The potency of your touch times the distance between that touch and today determines the intensity of my desperation. I regret leaving you, and I’m disappointed you let me go.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

42. “There was still so much to tell you – things too ugly to know or say.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

43. “Romanticism requires bravery and risk.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

44. “I’m a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

45. “He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him that I had been good. He said, “You don’t need to be nice.” My mother said that was when I became trouble.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

46. “Pain expanded my heart.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

47. “I can’t believe my reserve of water – from my nose and eyes. I have dormant fluid in my body, every woman does. I don’t know if I am a cavern or a river. Once, you said I was a geyser: a hole in the ground – bursting.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

48. “People have a right to think things will change. I allowed myself that much.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

49. “I wanted as much of the world as I could take, and I didn’t have the conscience to be ashamed.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot

50. “You’ve said before that I’m mercurial. I don’t know. Pain feels faster than light. I react to pain, and there’s too much of it.”

— Terese Marie Mailhot