Top 100 Trista Mateer Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “What brings us together will always be more powerful than what keeps us apart.”

— Trista Mateer

2. “No one can take your story from you if you know how to wield words. Their voices may be many but yours will be honest. You have the power to right wrongs and sing truths. You still have the pen in your hand no matter what you choose to do with it.”

— Trista Mateer

3. “I know that I am lucky to be alive at the same time as you. I know that finding you was a cosmic needle in a haystack, a joke of Internet cables and telephone wires. But I also know that you are more afraid of opening up than losing me.”

— Trista Mateer

4. “Regardless of whether you desire it, love is what sits at the core of the world. It is stronger than greed and hate and jealousy and pain. What brings us together will always be more powerful than what keeps us apart.”

— Trista Mateer

5. “Love was a museum where we took down the art that was there before us and played masterpiece with all the empty space.”

— Trista Mateer

6. “My pain has always deserved a voice and I will not deny it that, but I won’t devote my life to it either.”

— Trista Mateer

7. “Let me leave you with this: your life is short and all the more precious for it. I do not seek to tell you how to live, only to live at all. to not fear the day. to know you are stronger than what has hurt you. to know that you will triumph.”

— Trista Mateer

8. “In Troy they fought over Helen like children but Achilles mourned Patroclus the way a soul mourns a body.”

— Trista Mateer

9. “The thing about embracing your own chaos is that it never becomes clear when you need to stop.”

— Trista Mateer

10. “I taste like salt. You taste like toothpaste. There’s no poetry in that. It’s just life.”

— Trista Mateer

11. “I’m trying to remember to make room in my life for the person I am now, not just the people I have been.”

— Trista Mateer

12. “I know I don’t feel like myself but I’m starting to forget what that felt like at all.”

— Trista Mateer

13. “I know I have bigger problems than who I’m not kissing right now but three margaritas in, I wonder how safe your number is in my phone.”

— Trista Mateer

14. “Love knows no face. Love knows no gender. Love knows no sexuality. Love knows only love. We waste so much time trying to explain ourselves.”

— Trista Mateer

15. “I had to step back for a while to get to know myself again but now I don’t know how to step forward.”

— Trista Mateer

16. “Men said she was the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world, but men are the ones who wrote the stories. Men wrote the myths down and called them history, and time has dragged them further form the truth. Pandora’s jar became a box. Eve’s pomegranate, an apple. All the details change but one: it is a woman with her hand on the door to Hell.”

— Trista Mateer

17. “When people say you cannot love others until you love yourself, they fundamentally misunderstand love. Nothing thrives in isolation.”

— Trista Mateer

18. “You have to let something go. You carry too much in your heart. There’s no room for anything else.”

— Trista Mateer

19. “You’re made of the same stars as me. You may not have walked fully formed out of the ocean but the past is the past for a reason. Nothing that came before matters unless you want it to.”

— Trista Mateer

20. “You are not required to be small. You are not required to be pleasant. You are not required to be conventional. You are not required to be accommodating. You are not required to be submissive. You are not required to be merciful. You are not required to be quiet.”

— Trista Mateer

21. “To stop resenting my mother I had to unlearn the idea that our parents are these infallible beings who always know the right thing to do, and do it. I had to realize that she’s more than a mother. She’s a person with unresolved trauma and she’s scared of being alone and she’s frustrated with existence, just like everyone else.”

— Trista Mateer

22. “You forgive your mother for the things she did wrong, because of the things that were done wrong to her. You expect your children to do the same. Everyone’s backs ache under the weight.”

— Trista Mateer

23. “Accepting this body did not mean convincing myself that it was beautiful; it meant giving myself permission to exist regardless.”

— Trista Mateer

24. “I don’t want to be another name on the list of angry women in our family.”

— Trista Mateer

25. “They wanted you to believe that love is weak, that you cannot curse and kiss with the same mouth. They wanted you to believe that the root of love is romance, soft and wide-eyed. See what they did to my stories? My Temples? My statues? Regardless o whether you desire it, love is what sits at the core of the world. It is stronger than greed and hate and jealousy and pain. What brings us together will always be more powerful than what keeps us apart.”

— Trista Mateer

26. “Don’t you ever let another human being tear you apart. Remember that you have claws and teeth, too.”

— Trista Mateer

27. “There is nothing inherently toxic about anger. It is hard not to be angry. There is no reason not to be angry.”

— Trista Mateer

28. “I will not be a fairy-tale mermaid willing to give up her own voice for love.”

— Trista Mateer

29. “All of us are survivors until we are not anymore.”

— Trista Mateer

30. “She says, “I thought you weren’t looking for love.” I say, “That doesn’t mean I’m not hoping it will find me.”

— Trista Mateer

31. “The person you are at the beginning of a story is rarely who you are at the end of one.”

— Trista Mateer

32. “When you fight for what is just, prepare to meet opposition. Remember, it is the good in us that stands in front of what needs protecting. There will always be reasons to back down but there will always be more to push forward.”

— Trista Mateer

33. “I Swear Somewhere This Works In a parallel universe or another world or a different life, we sit across from each other at the kitchen table and go over the grocery list.”

— Trista Mateer

34. “I promised no more poetry and I’d rather think of this as a confession: you are still the first person I want to share new things with.”

— Trista Mateer

35. “Like everyone called a woman, they say I had no childhood. They say I rose from the sea fully formed, forced to bear the weight of other people’s desire. It’s not the truth, but it’s close enough.”

— Trista Mateer

36. “This is what the poems are for: telling other people the things I can no longer tell you.”

— Trista Mateer

37. “Some people are born flight risks. It is no shortcoming of yours that they cannot keep their feet on the ground. It is not your fault that they cannot seem to stand in place. They are not leaving you; they are just leaving.”

— Trista Mateer

38. “I’m still trying to figure out who I am alone so that I know who I am in front of other people.”

— Trista Mateer

39. “The poet lusts after emotionally unavailable people because she doesn’t have to worry about commitment. The poet desperately wants commitment.”

— Trista Mateer

40. “I am as reliable as public transportation. I have hands made of guardrails and a train station heart; it is full of strangers always trying to get somewhere else. It’s not a final destination.”

— Trista Mateer

41. “It is simple. You believe in the triumphs of love despite growing up in full view of its defeat because you are brave.”

— Trista Mateer

42. “You are not defined by the people you walk away from, and you are not defined by the people who walk away from you.”

— Trista Mateer

43. “I still write poems for you the same way other people bring flowers to graves.”

— Trista Mateer

44. “There was a time when I treated red flags like roses, happy to be handed anything.”

— Trista Mateer

45. “I’m afraid of driving and wanting to crash on purpose.”

— Trista Mateer

46. “I will greet you with a mouth full of barbed wire until you learn to stop coming after me with your hands.”

— Trista Mateer

47. “Sometimes I think I resented you so much it felt like love.”

— Trista Mateer

48. “Even a match remembers the moment before it was struck.”

— Trista Mateer

49. “My father was the kind of man who would always pull over at the site of an accident to offer help even if phone calls had already been made, even if people were already there. It was his sole redeeming quality; he ran away only from the messes he made.”

— Trista Mateer

50. “And you might curse the one who teaches you what it feels like to cry at the bottom of the shower in the middle of the night, but it is important to learn how to get back up on your own feet and let the wolf in your throat howl at the moon once in a while.”

— Trista Mateer