Carmen Maria Machado Quotes

Why do we teach girls their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?" I would yell. I want to reclaim these word. After all, melodrama comes from melos, which means music, honey. A drama queen is nonetheless a queen. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architect's intentions. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I thought you died, but writing this, I'm not sure you did. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I think she adored this version of me, whose difficulties were, for all intents and purposes, childlike. She was a good mother for young children. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

You are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone's feelings. You are (…) embarrassed to be alive. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Then one day, you learned that rapture could also mean blissful happiness, and you understood, fully, that it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

They are talking about how we can't trust the faded women, women who can't be touched but can stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

But this story? This one's mine. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

No one knows what causes it. It's not passed in the air. It's not sexually transmitted. It's not a virus or a bacteria, or if it is, it's nothing scientists have been able to find. At first everyone blamed the fashion industry, then the millennials, and, finally, the water. But the water's been tested, the millennials aren't the only ones going incorporeal, and it doesn't do the fashion industry any good to have women fading away. You can't put clothes on air. Not that they haven't tried. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

And isn't that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence? ~ Carmen Maria Machado

That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood---a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

There is a story they tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard after dark. This was her folly: when they told her that standing on someone's grave at night would cause the inhabitant to reach up and pull her under, she scoffed. Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make.

I will show you, she said.

Pride is the second mistake.

They gave her a knife to stick into the frosty earth, as a way of proving her presence and her theory.

She went to that graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone.

She knelt on the grave and plunged the blade deep. As she stood to run she found she couldn't escape. Something was clutching at her clothes. She cried out and fell down.

When morning came, her friends arrived at the cemetery. They found her dead on the grave, the blade pinning the sturdy wool of her skirt to the ground. Dead of fright or exposure, would it matter when the parents arrived? She was not wrong, but it didn't matter any more. Afterwards, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she could live.

As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. When she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and I let her step inside. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

One of my favourite stories is about an old woman and her husband – a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims. She was only able to keep him satisfied with her unparalleled cooking, to which he was a complete captive. One day, he bought her a fat liver to cook for him, and she did, using herbs and broth. But the smell of her own artistry overtook her, and a few nibbles became a few bites, and soon the liver was gone. She had no money with which to purchase a second one, and she was terrified of her husband's reaction should he discover that his meal was gone. So she crept to the church next door, where a woman had been recently laid to rest. She approached the shrouded figure, then cut into it with a pair of kitchen shears and stole the liver from her corpse.

That night, the woman's husband dabbed his lips with a napkin and declared the meal the finest he'd ever eaten. When they went to sleep, the old woman heard the front door open, and a thin wail wafted through the rooms. Who has my liver? Whooooo has my liver?

The old woman could hear the voice coming closer and closer to the bedroom. There was a hush as the door swung open. The dead woman posed her query again.

The old woman flung the blanket off her husband.

– He has it! She declared triumphantly.

Then she saw the face of the dead woman, and recognized her own mouth and eyes. She looked down at her abd ~ Carmen Maria Machado

What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of if?
What is worse: writing a Trope or being one? What about being more that one? ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Autumn was the worst time to go into the mountains, I thought to myself. To drive into the wilderness when it writhed and gasped for air seemed foolish. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

She's like dough, how the give of it beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Sometimes I wonder if the bars make the monsters and not the other way around. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

And there was nothing in my eyes. Or even worse -- nothingness. Not the presence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

When the baby cries, she could be hungry or thirsty or angry or cranky or sick or sleepy or paranoid or jealous or she had planned something but it went horribly awry. So you'll need to take care of that, when it happens. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I had no self-control, but tomorrow I would relinquish control and everything would be right again. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

This is what my mother and I don't talk about: That it is not my fault she is so profoundly unhappy with her life. That she had a chance to know me - really know me, as an adult and an artist and a human being - and she blew it. That I have not regretted our estrangement for one single second; in fact, I keep waiting for the regret to appear and being surprised when it doesn't. That I feel bad for her that she is so dissatisfied with her own life; I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. That I miss what we had when I was a kid, but I'm not a kid anymore, and I will never be again. And that the thing that keeps me from tackling parenthood with eagerness is not, really, money or ambition or hypochondria or selfishness. Rather, it's the fear that I've learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, your course, is "silence." But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

And as the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you're going to tell someone how bad it is, you're gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I do not even struggle to speak. The spark of words dies so deep in my chest, there is not even space to mount them on an exhale. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? ~ Carmen Maria Machado

As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

…all you can think about is Clara Barton, the feminist icon of your youth who had to teach herself how to be a nurse and endured abuse from men telling her what to do at every turn, and you remember being so *angry* and running to your parents and asking them if women still got told what was right or proper, and your mom said 'Yes' and your dad said 'No,' and you, for the first time, had an inkling of how complicated and terrible the world was… ~ Carmen Maria Machado

...abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

But without ego," Diego said, "your writing is just scribbles in a journal. Your art is just doodles. Ego demands that what you do is important enought that you be given money to work on it." He gestured to the hotel around us. "It demands that what you say is important enough that it be published or shown to the world. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can't help but respond to that state. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I will look where her eyes would be. I will open my mouth to ask but then realize the question has answered itself: by loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal. She will outlive me by a hundred million years; more, even. She will outlive my daughter, and my daughter's daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind, their inscrutable forms and unknowable destinies. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

You will never feel as desperate and fucked up and horrible as you do when you hear those things. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die. And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where. we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy – that constant, roving hunger – you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart first with the sun. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I've missed you," he says.

I've missed myself, you want to say, but you don't. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears. Windex is political. Si is the incense you burn to hide the smell of sex, or a fight. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I took a step toward her. "It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right," I said. "It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them." The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. "You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I was a creature so small, trapped in some crevice of an indifferent universe. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Maria Edgeworth grumbled against vandals who ruined immortal works by quoting the life out of them. "How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets." Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, scissored, patched, and frayed. ~ Willis Regier

I may have discovered what those beans are." It was a weak opening. What I really wanted to say was, "What the hell's the matter with you?" But I thought a soft approach more prudent. ~ Maria V. Snyder

It is better to not believe a truth than to believe a lie, because this defines yourself too. If you believe a lie that has negative effects, it shows you may have malicious intentions. But if you don't believe a truth that has negative effects, then you may be well-disposed. ~ Maria Karvouni

Some Queen of the Pipes, I thought. I'd believed I was better than a mindless drone. But I was the mindless one, hiding away. Even now I referred to them as if I didn't belong. ~ Maria V. Snyder

If it doesn't feel right, don't do it. Trust your intuition and don't ask "why", just say no. ~ Maria Erving

I'm grieving over what a jerk you are... ~ Maria Semple

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms. ~ Maria Edgeworth

Don't ever, ever, believe anyone who tells you that you can just get by, by doing the easiest thing possible. Because there's always somebody behind you who really wants to do what you're doing. And they're going to work harder than you if you're not working hard. ~ Maria Bartiromo

In the '90s, comedy was at a very low point, but these days, you've got people like Hannibal Burress, Ron Funches, Maria Bamford - people who can play any club, anywhere. ~ Andy Kindler

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence. ~ Maria Montessori

The Panther
His gaze is from the passing of bars
so exhausted, that it doesn't hold a thing anymore.
For him, it's as if there were thousands of bars
and behind the thousands of bars no world.
The sure stride of lithe, powerful steps,
that around the smallest of circles turns,
is like a dance of pure energy about a center,
in which a great will stands numbed.
Only occasionally, without a sound, do the covers
of the eyes slide open - . An image rushes in,
goes through the tensed silence of the frame
only to vanish, forever, in the heart. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The prize and punishments are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them. ~ Maria Montessori

A bitch. No prostitute. A bitch. If you were a Russian you would understand. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

While it's wonderful that investors have access to all the data now available to them, it has become a full-time job to sift through it and separate out the valuable news from the useless noise. ~ Maria Bartiromo

Why must a man be always taking on Things not his own, as if he were a servant whose marketing-bag grows heavier and heavier from stall to stall and, loaded down, he follows and doesn't dare ask: Master, why this banquet? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged. ~ Maria Callas

But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Two weeks later I'm the last one in the locker room to change for gym. The click of heels makes me look up. It's Carmen Sanchez. I don't freak out. Instead, I stand and look right at her.
"He was back in Fairfield, you know," she tells me.
"I know," I say, remembering the hand warmers in my locker. But he left. Like a whisper, he was there and then disappeared.
She looks almost nervous, vulnerable. "You know those giant stuffed-animal prizes at the carnival? The kind practically nobody wins, except the lucky few? I've never won one."
"Yeah. I've never won one, either."
"Alex was my giant prize. I hated you for taking him away," she admits.
I shrug. "Yeah, well, stop hating me. I don't have him, either."
"I don't hate you anymore," she says. "I've moved on."
I swallow and then say, "Me, too."
Carmen chuckles. Then, just as she walks out of the room, I hear her mumble, "Alex sure as hell hasn't."
What's that supposed to mean? ~ Simone Elkeles

It's funny. Maria Elena and I, we are meant for each other and not meant for each other, it's a contradiction. ~ Woody Allen

Spirituality will only be recognized
by spiritual people.
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Religion of Blue Circle
Babaji ~ Petra Hermans

Devlen: Stop second-guessing yourself. Do what you need to do. Don't apologize. When the time comes, you'll know what is important and what isn't.
Opal: I thought you said there weren't any easy answer.
Devlen: I didn't say it would be easy. Sometimes being true to yourself is the hardest thing to do. ~ Maria V. Snyder

But nature, exhausted, takes lovers back into herself
as if she couldn't accomplish that kind of vitality twice. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Chess computers do not sweat during time pressure and commit costly blunders. Furthermore, the strength of these programs (over and above their faultless recall processes) lies in their capacity to make relatively superficial tactical decisions with incredible speed. Positional values, long-range strategy, aesthetic judgment, and political astuteness remain staples of human performance, man vs. machine results in the foreseeable future to the contrary not withstanding. ~ Ira Carmen

Madeline (said the Countess in a solemn voice), in my concern for your father, I spoke unguardedly; and I already repent having done so from the situation I see you in: but, as some atonement for doing so, I will take this opportunity of cautioning you against all imprudent curiosity; let no incentive from it ever tempt you to seek an explanation of former occurrences; be assured your happiness depends entirely on your ignorance of them: was the dark volume of your father's fate ever opened to your view, peace would for ever forsake your breast; for its characters are marked by horror, and stained with blood. ~ Regina Maria Roche

The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child. ~ Maria Montessori

Life - a sexually transmitted terminal condition. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and a grey subway; - it affects me as though it were my mother. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

There are a lot of myths around Mental Health sufferers. People are very biased towards them. This should change. People should try to understand and not outcry them. The stigma should be erased. ~ Maria Karvouni

Going away is not always so simple - when one takes oneself along. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our acceptance of it is not bad; what is bad is that almost all men misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying for the heights. Mankind have turned eating, too, into something else: want on the one hand, and superfluity on the other, have dulled the clarity of this need, and all those deep, simple necessities by which life renews itself have become similarly dull. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is not a businessman who wants to see a return on his investments. And imagination needs only a few nails on which to hang its veil. Whether they are of gold, tin, or covered with rust makes no difference to it. Wherever it gets caught, it is caught. Thornbush or rosebush, as soon as the veil of moonlight and mother-of-pearl has fallen on it, either becomes a fairy tale out of A Thousand and One Nights ~ Erich Maria Remarque

We're all works of art in progress. ~ Carmen Dell'Orefice

Ravic knew the danger; he knew whither he was going and he also knew that tomorrow he would resist again - but suddenly in this night, in this hour of his return from a lost Ararat into the blood-smell of coming destruction, everything became nameless. Danger was danger and not danger; fate was at the same time a sacrifice and the deity to whom one sacrificed. And tomorrow was an unknown world ~ Erich Maria Remarque

There comes a time when we have deposited in it all our firstlings, all beginning, all confidence, the seeds of all that which might perhaps some day come to be. And suddenly we realize: All that has sunk into a deep sea, and we don't even know just when. We never noticed it. As though some one were to collect all his money, and buy a feather with it and stick the feather in his hat: whish!
the first breeze will carry it away. Naturally he arrives home without his feather, and nothing remains for him but to look back and think when it would have flown. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost. ~ Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us? ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Meatspace equals entropy. Impermanence. The fading of anger or passion is analogous to the fading of a photograph, the yellowing of old newspaper, as we've seen in a thousand movies. Through time we mend, heal, alter our convictions, learn; what burned cools, and what froze melts; both grief and delight are fated to end, sometimes abruptly, yes, but more often gradually, even imperceptibly. Entropy is our enemy, but also our friend; it defines that part of us that is changing, coming into bloom and then, because we are mortal, fading. ~ Maria Bustillos