Top 100 Trista Mateer Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “And now that I am older, I don’t give a damn about sin. I will be the first to cast one.”

— Trista Mateer

52. “If we both look at the same moon and you still want to call to say goodnight then maybe we’re not looking at the same moon anymore.”

— Trista Mateer

53. “Walking away from you feels like not taking care of myself.”

— Trista Mateer

54. “It’s just that I am selfish and gas is expensive and it’s hard to tell the difference between wanting to die and just wanting to sink for a while. It’s just that I knew a boy once who said those words to me only when he wanted my undivided attention and my legs spread in the back of his car. It’s just that I thought it was one thing to want to die and another thing to pick up kitchen knives.”

— Trista Mateer

55. “I still wake up with things to tell you.”

— Trista Mateer

56. “I’m afraid of never loving someone as much as I loved the last person who broke my heart.”

— Trista Mateer

57. “I do not tell her that sometimes it feels like compromising yourself is part of growing up.”

— Trista Mateer

58. “A BRIEF INTERLUDE It’s been three years since I’ve spent the night with someone who liked me enough to get breakfast in the morning. Still, I spread my heart thin like butter on toast, hoping someone else will come along and snatch it off my plate. Still, I stumble half-dressed out of other people’s apartments and treat myself to coffee on the way home. This is not a poem that seeks to make a spectacle of loneliness.”

— Trista Mateer

59. “I keep rewriting this poem. I want it to make more sense. I want it to be less honest.”

— Trista Mateer

60. “I thought I could walk away from love and it would let me.”

— Trista Mateer

61. “My brother talks about car accidents the same way I talk about family. I don’t know when he learned to forgive. I don’t remember teaching him that. I don’t remember learning it myself. His life’s ambition is to be the man my father never was: to step up to the plate, to grow into a firefighter’s uniform or ride shotgun in an ambulance. I am still stuck on the bathroom floor with my resentment.”

— Trista Mateer

62. “The poet can’t stand the quiet. She can’t stand the buzzing in her head. The murmur of memory. The poet picks up a book of poetry. It is not her writing but it reads the same way. It is not her story but the ending is similar enough to pass. The poet tries to read a verse out loud and only tastes blood in her mouth. The poet worries she is writing the same poem over and over. No matter what words she puts down, it comes out with a bite.”

— Trista Mateer

63. “I don’t know what it is in me that yearns to be the lifeboat that people throw themselves at when they are drowning.”

— Trista Mateer

64. “The poet is afraid to make any place feel too much like home because then she might have to stop running.”

— Trista Mateer

65. “Girl like a garden you never volunteered to tend. Dirt all tracked into your front hall.”

— Trista Mateer

66. “All the details change but one: it is a woman with her hand on the door to Hell.”

— Trista Mateer

67. “I’ve gotten so good about not flinching at the sound of your name that people don’t know I’d still throw myself mouth-open into the ocean for the chance to drown somewhere you might see it.”

— Trista Mateer

68. “I treat my greatest loves like seeds. I put them down and I seldom look back at what has grown behind me.”

— Trista Mateer

69. “I feel most like myself when I am washing blood off my hands; and I hope whatever is eating you alive does it as slowly as possible.”

— Trista Mateer

70. “She writes a lot about religion for someone who looks out of place in a pew.”

— Trista Mateer

71. “If love is a door I keep closed, will it be a wound I keep open?”

— Trista Mateer

72. “Aphrodite tells me that love is like wine. If your cup is already full and you try to add more, it ill just spill onto the carpet. Some people try and try and just stain everything. Their fingers are purple with want.”

— Trista Mateer

73. “They called me Gravedigger.”

— Trista Mateer

74. “I wanted to taste the salt on your skin, to press my mouth against the violent curve of you.”

— Trista Mateer

75. “I’ll do anything if you say my name three times. I need to be reminded that I exist.”

— Trista Mateer

76. “I know I said some things about needing space, but you are not the moon or the sun, a planet or a dwarf star. I do not know if distance from you will ever sit right with me.”

— Trista Mateer

77. “Now you have the audacity to bloom on my doorstep again like some cheap metaphor for spring. You rise from the ashes of my mistrust and you do this unforgivable thing: you still make me go soft in the middle.”

— Trista Mateer

78. “I wept at what became of my name.”

— Trista Mateer

79. “I have this dream where I only write you love poems and none of them have to say, “I’m so glad we’re alive.”

— Trista Mateer

80. “Some people will leave you. It will have everything to do with you and nothing to do with outside circumstances. You cannot sugarcoat it. You cannot dress it up and make it feel sweet or soft or warm. And it’s going to hurt you. I know your instinct will be to beg them to stay, to unpack their bags for them, to curl up by their wandering feet – but people are going to leave you. That is okay too.”

— Trista Mateer

81. “Your abuser’s past does not absolve them of their abuse. Their depression does not absolve them of their abuse. Your relationship with them does not absolve them of their abuse. How long you’ve known them does not absolve them of their abuse. Your love for them does not absolve them of their abuse.”

— Trista Mateer

82. “I’d rather hold a grudge than have an empty hand. At least it’s something.”

— Trista Mateer

83. “I am always two parts tequila, one part longing.”

— Trista Mateer

84. “That is okay. It is okay to leave. It is okay to feel smothered by the weight of a life you didn’t want or a relationship that doesn’t taste the way you thought it would. It does not make you hard or disagreeable or unreasonable.”

— Trista Mateer

85. “I am older than the poets and I am older than the pens. I am older than the stars and the ocean I crawled out of.”

— Trista Mateer

86. “I slept incredibly well before I met you.”

— Trista Mateer

87. “You long winter masquerading as spring.”

— Trista Mateer

88. “And I believe all men think of me as a person. Correction: not all men. And I believe all men care about consent. Correction: not all men.”

— Trista Mateer

89. “I keep trying to make myself small enough to give other people space to grow.”

— Trista Mateer

90. “The world was full of men who called themselves heroes for crossing boundaries, claiming bodies like prizes. The world still is.”

— Trista Mateer

91. “You touched me more than once with tenderness and I never mistook it for affection. I know the code of miserable people. I was the rat trap for your loneliness. And the rat. And the loneliness. See how much poison I can swallow when it’s hand-fed?”

— Trista Mateer

92. “I stand in awe of your survival.”

— Trista Mateer

93. “I stayed as long as anyone can stay in a place they don’t really belong.”

— Trista Mateer

94. “I am writing bad poems but I am writing look at that.”

— Trista Mateer

95. “Yesterday I sat at a bar with a stranger and we practiced swallowing each other’s accents.”

— Trista Mateer

96. “You tried to make a grave out of me and I almost let you.”

— Trista Mateer

97. “Wouldn’t have to hate yourself if you were dead, though her brain counters.”

— Trista Mateer

98. “And then God doesn’t answer, but Amanda does.”

— Trista Mateer

99. “You were right when you said I’ve only had bad examples of love. I grew up thinking that it was a chore, that it did not have to be easy, that it was okay to be hard. But our was the exchange that defined “love” for me: unconditional even when it was distanced, never arrogant, always kind.”

— Trista Mateer

100. “I had to ask for directions seven different times in LAX. It’s a monstrosity built almost entirely out of anxiety. It’s a shrine to nervousness.”

— Trista Mateer