58 Quotes by Carmen Maria Machado

When you think about it, stories havethis way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is bornefrom the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there isno way to tell them apart.

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.

Sometimes I wonder if the bars make the monsters and not the other way around.

In her essay "Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the "violence of the archive.’’This concept---also called “archival silence”---illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.