Top 200 Kate Elizabeth Russell Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “He’s the only person who ever understood that desire. Not to die, but to already be dead.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

102. “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

103. “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

104. “Ik voel me niet en ik weet dat ik nee kan zeggen, maar dat is niet hetzelfde als de baas zijn.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

106. “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

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

108. “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

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

111. “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

112. “Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

115. “Ruby’s far off voice asks me where I have gone, but she knows that it’s the truth that has spooked me, the expanse of it, the starkness. It offers nowhere to hide.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

130. “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

131. “If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

132. “If I’m deceitful and cruel, so is he.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

133. “Do you want me to tell you it’s ok? That I forgive you? Because I don’t.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “I go on and on, parroting his arguments, the part of him left inside me suddenly risen and fully alive.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

138. “I can see myself at the head of my own classroom, telling my own students what to read and write. Maybe that’s what this has always been about – not wanting these men but wanting to be them.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

139. “After a while, she gives up repeating the same lines, knowing there comes a point when they no longer matter, that what I need isn’t absolution but to hold myself accountable before a witness.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

140. “I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere in my belly they’ll take root and grow.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

141. “She opens my bottom desk drawer and gasps. It’s full of trash: crumpled papers, food wrappers, used tissues, a blackened banana peel. I’d filled it in a panic a few weeks ago right before room inspections and forgotten to clean it out.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

147. “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

148. “I know how hard this must be for you,′ he says, ‘but it could be an opportunity, right? To make peace with it and move on.’ I force myself to breathe through the thought. ‘Make peace and move on’ sounds like jumping off a cliff, sounds like dying.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

149. “He sits beside me, takes my face in his hands. “You’re perfect,” he says. “You’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

150. “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