Carmen Maria Machado Quotes

“You tried to tell your story to people who didn't know how to listen.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“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, In the Dream House

“I thought you died, but writing this, I'm not sure you did.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, 'If I just looked a little different, I'd be drowning in love'? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“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, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“I've missed you," he says.

I've missed myself, you want to say, but you don't.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I want to say, Don't bother asking me anything. I want to say, There is nothing underneath.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“BAD BLOOD": Stabler and Benson will never forget the case where solving the crime was so much worse than the crime itself.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“None of us will make it to the end.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“But this story? This one's mine.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“He wishes they were still floating safely in the unborn space, which he imagines to be grayish-blue, like the Atlantic, studded with star-like points of light, and thick as corn syrup.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember, it's that you'll remember.”
― Sarah Manguso

“You will never feel as desperate and fucked up and horrible as you do when you hear those things.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Please don't shut me out. Or if you're going to, just tell me, tell me so that I'm not dangling in this in-between space.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“The car is going so fast that you feel wild, you feel like you could die right now and it would be thrilling. You realize you are laughing, and he goes even faster.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“No, Novikov's time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she'd meant to prevent.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House