Top 200 Kate Elizabeth Russell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

2. “There must be a point where you’re allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

3. “I’m going to ruin you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

4. “He was a grown man and you were fifteen,” she says. “What could you have possibly done to torture him?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

5. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

6. “Vanessa,” she says gently, “you didn’t ask for that. You were just trying to go to school.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

7. “I’m no longer myself; I am no one. I’m a red balloon caught in the boughs of a tree. I’m nothing at all.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

8. “How much strength does it take to hurt a little girl? How much strength does it take for the girl to get over it? Which one of them do you think is stronger?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

9. “The article says Strane groomed the girls. Groomed. I repeat the word over and over, try to understand what it means, but all I can think of is the lovely warm feeling I’d get when he stroked my hair.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

10. “I ignore what hangs in the air above us, my anger, my humiliation and hurt. They seem like the real monsters, all those unspeakable things.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

11. “I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

12. “My most brazen behavior: going braless one day under a silk camisole, but then I’m disgusted when he stares – so what is it that I want? I don’t know, I don’t know.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

13. “When Strane and I met, I was fifteen and he was forty-two, a near perfect thirty years between us. That’s how I described the difference back then – perfect. I loved the math of it, three times my age, how easy it was to imagine three of me fitting inside him: one of me curled around his brain, another around his heart, the third turned to liquid and sliding through his veins.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

14. “Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

15. “Mom says dwelling in your feelings is no way to live, that there will always be something to be upset about and the secret to a happy life is not to let yourself be dragged down into negativity. She doesn’t understand how satisfying sadness can be; hours spent rocking in the hammock with Fiona Apple in my ears make me feel better than happy.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

16. “His voice as soothing as a bomb.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

17. “Longtime Browick Schoolteacher Found Dead in Norumbega River.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

18. “He says that by believing our lives have endless possibilities, we stave off the horrifying truth that to live is merely to move forward through time while an internal clock counts down to a final, fatal moment. “We’re born, we live, we die,” he says, “and the choices we make in the middle, all those things we agonize over day after day, none of those matter in the end.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

19. “People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

20. “I get the feeling all he really wants is to leave part of himself inside me, to stake his claim, not to impregnate me or anything like that, but something more permanent. He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

21. “The secrecy, once a necessity, now seems a product of shame.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

22. “Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

23. “Humbert, describing the qualities of the nymphet hidden among ordinary girls: “she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

24. “I feel a familiar fear: maybe I’m crazy, narcissistic, delusional. Someone so stuck in her own brain, she turns unwilling bystanders into ghosts.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

25. “I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

26. “So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

27. “Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

28. “There’s another option for those brave enough to take it: bypass boys altogether, go straight to men. Men who will never make you wait; men who are starved and grateful for scraps of attention, who fall in love so hard they throw themselves at your feet.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

29. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to mock. It’s just so typical, you know? That way he’d berate himself to make you feel sorry for him.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

30. “Vanessa, you were young and dripping with beauty. You were teenage and erotic and so alive, it scared the hell out of me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

31. “He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

32. “I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me – breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

33. “If I think about how many days lie before me, I end up obsessing over things I know I shouldn’t. Like, maybe being dead isn’t the worst thing. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

34. “I don’t remember, not exactly. So many of my memories from back then are shadowy, incomplete. I need him to fill in the gaps, though sometimes the girl he describes sounds like a stranger.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

35. “I want to be low enough to slip beneath the surface and swim without needing air. He’s the only person who ever understood that desire. Not to die, but to already be dead.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

36. “The nine other students pack up their things and leave the classroom to carry on with their lives, to practices and rehearsals and club meetings. I leave the room, too, but I’m not part of them. They’re the same, but I’m changed. I’m unhuman now. Unthetered. While they walk across campus, earthbound and ordinary, I soar, trailing a maple-red comet tail. I’m no longer myself; I am no one. I’m a red balloon caught in the boughts of a tree. I’m nothing at all.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

37. “I haven’t been gaslighted into senselessness.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

38. “Assault can be anything, like how battery can mean you grabbed someone by the wrist or shoved their shoulder. It’s a meaningless legal term.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

39. “Really, I just hate it when he gets angry at me, because that’s when I feel things that probably shouldn’t be there in the first place, shame and fear, a voice urging me to run.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

40. “I tell him I’m sorry. I don’t want to say it but feel I have to, like he needs to hear it so badly, he’s pulling the words out of me like teeth. I’m sorry you’ll never get out from under the long shadow I cast. I’m sorry what we did together was so horrific, there’s no path back from it.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

41. “We’re born, we live, we die, he says and the choices we make in the middle, all those things we agonize over day after day, none of those matter in the end.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

42. “With the sun on my face and a dog at my side, I have so much capacity for good.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

43. “He traces road maps of blue veins on my skin, talks about how hungry I make him, that he’d eat me if he could. I wordlessly offer him my arm. Go ahead. He gives it only a soft-mouthed bite, but I would probably let him tear me apart. I’d let him do anything.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

44. “Like find my inner child? Oh god. Kill me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

45. “He’ll never meet you,” I say. It’s a hard truth, carrying within it grief and joy. Jo opens her eyes, doesn’t lift her head as she watches me. She’s constantly taking in my face and tone, noticing everything about me. When I start to drift away, her tail thumps against the couch cushion, like a drumbeat, a heartbeat, a rhythm of grounding. You’re here, she says. You’re here. You’re here.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

46. “He’s always going to be old. He has to be. That’s the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

47. “She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

48. “She didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

49. “I think we’re very similar, Nessa,” he whispers. “From the way you write, I can tell you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

50. “Worry makes people butt in where they don’t belong.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell