Miles?! > Miles?!'s Quotes

“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, In the Dream House

“At eight I was reed-thin, anxious. I was too tightly wound to be dreamy, most of the time, but sitting in the grass gave me a kind of peace.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“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, In the Dream House

“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, In the Dream House

“Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“There is no comfort like complicity.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“The things about Shakespeare is, he's so eloquent...he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“The real sky was enormous overhead, making our mirrors and twinkling stage lights seem ridiculous- Man’s futile attempt to imitate God”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I never asked where he went, worried he wouldn’t ask me to follow.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I am all too aware of my own desperate need to find a message in the madness, and as it takes shape I am suspicious, afraid to hope. But the implications of the text and its small part in our story are impossible to ignore, too critical for a scholar as meticulous as James to overlook.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“We’re only ever playing fifty percent of a character. The rest is us, and we’re afraid to show people who we really are. We’re afraid of looking foolish if we reveal the full force of our emotions.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“When did we become such terrible people?”
“Maybe we’ve always been terrible.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Nothing makes sense to him either. His whole world is falling apart, and once he realizes he can’t stop it or fix it or change it, there’s only one thing left to do.” My eyes adjusted slowly, maddeningly. “What’s that?” His shadow shrugged in the gloom. “Absolve yourself. Blame it on fate.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“He was too spotless to talk of blood and murder like Macbeth, but in the red glare of the fire he no longer looked so angelic. Instead he was handsome the way you think of the devil as handsome—forbiddingly so.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“My martyrdom is not the selfless kind. I can't look at Filippa, shamed by all the injuries I've inflicted- like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest, ready to blow himself up without a thought for the collateral damage.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Were you in love with him?'
'Yes,' I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. 'Yes, I was.' It's not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I'm in love with him still.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“When it was his turn to speak I watched him closely, uncertain whether he was acting only, or if he and I were both gnashing secrets between our teeth.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains