Top 200 Kate Elizabeth Russell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My parents stare straight ahead, their anger and grief palpable enough to taste. I open my mouth to let it all in and swallow it whole, where deep in my belly it turns into blame.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

52. “In the photos, ferns brush my thighs and sunlight streams through my hair, making me look like a wood nymph, like Persephone wandering her meadow, waiting for Hades to come.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

53. “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

54. “I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

55. “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

56. “Another cycle – drink, smoke, swallow. 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. I remember trying to explain it to Ira. Just a glimpse was enough to make him worry, and worry never leads to anything good. Worry makes people butt in where they don’t belong. Any time I’ve ever heard the words “Vanessa, I worry about you,” my life has been blown apart.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

57. “Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out – trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

59. “Does that feel good? Does that make me happy? My eyelids flutter as his hands move up my thigh. He lives to please me. Even if we end up apart, right now, he worships me – his dark Vanessa. That should be enough. I’m lucky to have this, to be so loved.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

60. “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

61. “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

62. “For weeks, every time the phone rang, my body braced itself for the inevitable fallout.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

63. “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

64. “You can’t do that.” she says. “You don’t get to change the facts to suit the story you want to tell.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

65. “It’s a truth so blatant and bitter, not even I can sweeten it into something easier to swallow. He only wanted to make sure I’d stay quiet. He used me again.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

66. “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

67. “I walked into his classroom. I existed. I was born.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

68. “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

69. “He says, “It wasn’t the same with them, do you understand? It wasn’t like how it was with you. I loved you, Vanessa. I loved you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

70. “It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

71. “I’m unhuman now. Untethered.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

72. “Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

73. “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

74. “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

75. “I wonder if she would be hurt if I said I don’t really feel anything at all towards her anymore. That I can’t remember why losing her friendship had felt like losing the world, or why that friendship seemed so profound, never to be repeated. Now, it only strikes me as embarrassing, like any other outgrown phase.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

77. “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

78. “I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so long. You know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “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

79. “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

80. “I was oblivious back then, doing my best to follow his lead, and he saw no problem framing me as a troubled girl with a crush, knowing what it would do to me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

82. “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

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

84. “It’s just so typical, you know? That way he’d berate himself to make you feel sorry for him.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

85. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

86. “Flirting is supposed to be fun and this is too heavy for fun.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

87. “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.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

88. “The thought makes me so tired all I can think is I’d rather be dead than go through this again.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

89. “It’s just that I’m depraved, my mind so warped by Strane that I misinterpret innocent favoritism as sexual interest.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

90. “Aren’t you going to ask where I’ve been?” I say. She stares at me, into me. She sees everything. “If I did,” she says, “would you tell me the truth?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

91. “The line of Polaroids stretches across my living room, the strawberry pajamas draped over the radiator. I wonder what level of crazy I’ve reached and how much further I could go, how many more steps until I become a woman who boards up the windows to live uninterrupted in the filth of her past.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

92. “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

93. “Isn’t that what all teenage girls want? Endlessly bored, aching for an audience.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

94. “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

95. “I initially sought out the novel because a musician I adored named it as his favorite in Rolling Stone, but even if I’d never read that interview, I would have found my way to Lolita. Because it’s more than a book; it’s an unavoidable archetype baked into our culture.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

96. “Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

97. “It’s just my luck,” he said, “that when I finally find my soul mate, she’s fifteen years old.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

99. “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

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell