58 Quotes by Carmen Maria Machado

Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.

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.

You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that?

How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you?

You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe.

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.

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.

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.

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