Top 200 Kate Elizabeth Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

52. “Well, there you have it. Case closed.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

53. “I assume I’ll be the one he turns to in ten or fifteen years, whenever his body begins to break down. That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

54. “Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

55. “He keeps calling, but I’m out of reach. I’m a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so strong I can fly for miles. I’m the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

56. “When people are angry, they’re looking for a fight,” she says. “You act submissive, they back off.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

57. “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?” I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide-open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

58. “Afsluiten om weer verder te kunnen’ klinkt als van een klif afspringen, klinkt als doodgaan.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

59. “I remember my college roommate Bridget saying, after I first told her about Strane, Your life is like a movie. She didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

60. “I haven’t seen him since Christmas, when he told me about Taylor Birch. Over the months there’s been a change in him, his face somehow altered. I search until I find it: his glasses. They’re frameless now, nearly invisible. A pang hits my heart at the thought of him changing something so integral without telling me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

62. “That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

63. “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

64. “It’s both creepy and out of my control, this ability I have to notice so much about other people when I’m positive no one notices anything at all about me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

65. “I try to hide how happy this makes me feel by rolling my eyes, but his words break my chest wide open and leave me helpless. There’s nothing stopping him from reaching in and grabbing whatever he wants. I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “When we’re together,” he says, “it feels as though the dark things inside me rise to the surface and brush against the dark things inside you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

71. “At night after my parents go to bed, I stand in front of my bedroom mirror, study my face and hair and try to see myself as Mr. Strane sees me, a girl with maple-red hair who wears nice dresses and has good style, but I can’t get past the sight of myself as a pale, freckled child.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

72. “I don’t like the idea of him thinking there are things I don’t understand.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

73. “Girls I met only hours before wept beside me on my bed, telling me about their distant mothers and mean fathers and how their boyfriends cheated on them and that the world was a terrible place. None of them had had affairs with older men and they were still screwed up. If I had never met Strane, I doubt I would’ve turned out all that different. Some boy would’ve used me, taken me for granted, ripped my heart out. At least Strane gave me a better story to tell than theirs.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

74. “This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction. Once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

76. “When I was nine, I fell from the last tree I ever tried to climb.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

77. “Every so often, she holds her breath and listens to check if it’s still happening. When she hears the metal scrape of the bed frame, the slap of skin on skin, she holds the kitten closer, turns back to the rain.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

78. “The question slices a painless cut, shockingly clean.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

79. “It’s easy to pinpoint when it all started, that moment of walking into his sun-soaked classroom and feeling his eyes drink me in for the first time, but it’s harder to know when it ended, if it really ended at all. I think it stopped when I was twenty-two, when he said he needed to get himself together and couldn’t live a decent life while I was within reach, but for the past decade there have been late-night calls, him and me reliving the past, worrying the wound we both refuse to let heal.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

80. “No, not crazy,” Ruby says. “Traumatized.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

81. “So when my mother asks me to forgive her, I say, “Of course I do.“I don’t tell her again that she couldn’t have stopped it, that it wasn’t her fault and that she didn’t deserve it. I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere deep in my belly, they’ll take root and grow.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

82. “I wonder how much sympathy they have for a girl like me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

83. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. 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

84. “He reaches down then and opens his bottom desk drawer, pulls out a book, and my ears prick like a dog’s. Pavlovian – we learned about that in my psychology elective last spring.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

85. “This time of year just makes me feel nuts. Like I’m running out of time or something. Like I’m wasting my life.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

86. “My rage is left onshore while I’m pulled into deep water, floating on my back, little waves lapping against my ears.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

87. “Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. Maybe that lack of love shaped the loneliness he saw in me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

88. “I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

89. “I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

90. “I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

91. “I did lie. I sat there and let her believe what she wanted and felt no remorse. It didn’t even really feel like lying, more like shaping the truth to fit what she needed to hear, an act of contortion I learned from Strane-and I was good at it, able to manipulate the truth so covertly she had no idea what I’d done. Maybe I should have felt guilt afterward, but all I remember feeling is pride for getting away with it, for knowing how to protect her, him, myself, everyone at once.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

92. “Think of all the thoughtless pain we inflict. A mosquito on your arm; you don’t even hesitate to smack it dead.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

93. “Or, if I can’t scream it, I want to press the heels of my hands against the table, break through the wood until the whole thing cracks apart and the splintered pieces fall in such a way that the secret spells out across the floor.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

94. “There’s no need to try so hard. He created this mess. It’s his problem, not mine.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

95. “It’s possible he doesn’t want to see me ever again; maybe that was his goal when he had me sent away, to thrust me out of his life along with all the life-ruining repercussions I embody.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

96. “Even though I’m not supposed to, I spend most of my time reading charts.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

97. “For a moment, I hate him.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

98. “Ik zeg het niet, maar soms voel ik me alsof hij precies zo met me omgaat: me uit elkaar haalt en iets nieuws van me maakt.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

99. “I just really need it to be a love story.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

100. “Break his heart? I try to imagine myself having that power, holding his heart, mine to abuse, but even when I picture it pulsing and pumping in my hands, it’s still the boss of me, leading me around, jerking me this way and that with me clinging and unable to let go.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell