Top 200 Kate Elizabeth Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Strange to think that for them it’s just another Friday night, how easily their ordinary lives go on, running parallel to my own.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

103. “Now when we touch each other, the world doesn’t even notice. I know there should be freedom in that, but to me it only feels like loss.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

104. “He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

106. “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

107. “I wait outside to see if he’ll come after me but he doesn’t – of course he doesn’t.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

108. “At the time, I thought a man being wounded like that was romantic. Looking back, the whole thing was just deranged.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

109. “It propels me forward, the epitome of asking for it.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

110. “He says he sensed my difference as soon as he laid eyes on me. ‘Haven’t you always felt like an outsider, a misfit?’ he asks. ‘I’ll bet for as long as you can remember, you were called mature for your age. Weren’t you?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

111. “My worst habit, according to my mother, is how I deflect compliments with self-deprecation. I need to learn how to accept praise. It boils down to confidence, she says, or lack thereof.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

112. “It doesn’t matter that my skin crawls from touching him.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

113. “Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

114. “I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so long. You know? I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

115. “I was fifteen and he was forty-two, a near perfect thirty years between us.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

116. “So many of my memories from back then are shadowy, incomplete.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

117. “Because I lost things that were important to me,” I say. “While you lost nothing.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

118. “I was an obvious target. He chose me not because I was special, but because he was hungry and I was easy.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

119. “The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

120. “He’s the only person who ever understood that desire. Not to die, but to already be dead.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

121. “Does he really believe he’d ever go to prison, a Harvard-educated, well-spoken white man?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

122. “And just like that, my mind draws a new connection between the characters. Sometimes it really does feel like a curse, the meaning I can attach to anything.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

123. “I’d never admit to this, but the thought of a monster’s breath on the back of my neck gives me a thrill. It propels me forward, the epitome of asking for it.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

124. “I check my reflection in every window, a two-second glimpse of my hair fanning out from my face, possibly beautiful, though it seems equally possible I might be ugly.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

125. “I wonder if this is flirting, but it can’t be. Flirting is supposed to be fun and this is too heavy for fun.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

126. “The Road Not Taken” from memory. He says we shouldn’t feel uplifted by the poem, that Frost’s message is widely misunderstood. The poem isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice. 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.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

127. “What wrong?” he asks.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

128. “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

129. “It doesn’t seem right that we can speak to each other like normal people, or that he can bear to look at me without falling to his knees.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

130. “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

131. “I’ll remember everything as hard as I can. I’ll live inside these memories until I can see him again.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

132. “He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

133. “I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

134. “I have power, power to make it happen, power over him. I was an idiot for not realizing this sooner.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

135. “I can’t wrap my head around it, the deceit that requires, the cruelty.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

136. “On my way out of her office, I ask, “Did you know he married one of his students?” At first, I think I’ve dropped a bomb on her. Then she nods. Yes, she knows. She lifts her hands, a gesture of helplessness. “It happens sometimes,” she says.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

137. “I saw what I wanted to see, convinced myself my fantasies were real.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

138. “It might seem small to you,” she says. “But it was enough to wreck me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

139. “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

140. “Maybe you’ll break me,” I say. “Impossible.” “Why impossible?” “Because that isn’t how these stories end,” he says. “Why does it have to end at all?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

141. “He says, “Vanessa, when you look back, you’ll remember me as someone who loved you, just one of many. I guarantee your life is going to be so much bigger than me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

142. “Maybe that’s what this has always been about – not wanting these men but wanting to be them.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

143. “While they walk across campus, earthbound and ordinary, I soar, trailing a maple-red comet tail.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

144. “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.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

145. “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

146. “Everywhere makes me antsy to be someplace else.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

147. “I’m tired of him asking me for this, his insatiable need for reassurance. No, I’m not angry. Yes, I forgive you. Yes, I want this. No, I don’t think you’re a monster.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

148. “But those years aren’t lost. They’ve just been neglected for a while. You can recover yourself.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

149. “Someone so stuck in her own brain, she turns unwilling bystanders into ghosts.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

150. “Why did you come back if I hurt you?” he asks. “It didn’t feel finished,” I say. “I still felt tied to you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell