Top 35 Meredith Russo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I know it hurts. I know it hurts so bad you can barely breathe sometimes. I know because I’ve been there. Please don’t leave us. I promise life can be good, and we need you too much.”

— Meredith Russo

2. “For as long as I could remember, I had been apologizing for existing, for trying to be who I was, to live the life I was meant to lead.”

— Meredith Russo

3. “Just because you have a past doesn’t mean you can’t have a future.”

— Meredith Russo

4. “Maybe that’s what life is about: surviving what you can’t control and clinging to the good things the winds whip up.”

— Meredith Russo

5. “Being a girl in this world means being afraid. That fear’ll keep you safe. It’ll keep you alive.”

— Meredith Russo

6. “I wonder if maybe I just can’t cry anymore, if maybe growing up means testosterone is running through my body like an invading army, butchering and bunting everything tender.”

— Meredith Russo

7. “I’m not brave,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Bravery implies I had a choice. I’m just me, you know?” I.”

— Meredith Russo

8. “I wasn’t sorry I existed any more. I deserved to live. I deserved to find love. I knew now – I believed, now – that I deserved to be loved.”

— Meredith Russo

9. “Hell, even the straight people have enough skeletons in their closet to fill a tomb. Everybody’s too afraid of going to hell or getting made fun of to be honest about what they want and who they are, so they can’t even really admit what they want to themselves.”

— Meredith Russo

10. “Radical faith means you trust that the Lord visited these weaknesses and sorrows on you as part of His plan...”

— Meredith Russo

11. “Everybody’s got a past,′ he said. ‘That doesn’t mean you can’t have a future.”

— Meredith Russo

12. “You tried to kill yourself,” she said, rolling her eyes up to heaven and biting her knuckle. “Andrew Hardy was gonna die one way or the other, and one of the choices gave me a daughter in exchange while the other left me with no one.” “I.”

— Meredith Russo

13. “I like him a lot... I think I might love him. And it obviously isn’t everything, but being the way I am has been a huge part of my life. It’s easy to act like my past never happened, but it feels like I’ve put up this wall around my heart.”

— Meredith Russo

14. “God wanted me to live, and this was the only way I knew how to survive, so this was what God wanted.”

— Meredith Russo

15. “You can have anything,” she said, “once you admit you deserve it.”

— Meredith Russo

16. “I thought of going the rest of my life pretending I sprang to life from nothing at sixteen years old and felt my cheeks flush with shame and anger. I was so tired of cowering. I was so tired of hiding. I wanted to tell the truth, to say it out loud.”

— Meredith Russo

17. “There is no wrong way to express and embody your most authentic self!”

— Meredith Russo

18. “I felt guilty all of a sudden, as if just by existing and talking to him I was leading him on.”

— Meredith Russo

19. “A spark of electricity passes from me and into him, flooding out of my crowded heart and into his. I wonder what Morgan’s heart is like compared to mine. Empty isn’t the right word, though it’s the first that comes to mind. Minimalist. Maybe it’s more like yin and yang, like his heart is a dark, cool room after a hot, exhausting day.”

— Meredith Russo

20. “Art shares your world with other people so they can feel even a momentary connection with you.”

— Meredith Russo

21. “I wondered if joy could ever be felt by itself without being tainted with fear and confusion, or if some level of misery was a universal constant, like the speed of light.”

— Meredith Russo

22. “I decided that the people who had said God didn’t love me, who said that I didn’t have a place on Earth – they were wrong. God wanted me to live, and this was the only way I knew how to survive, so this was what God wanted.”

— Meredith Russo

23. “How much of life was like that, just waiting for me to come and give it a chance.”

— Meredith Russo

24. “You know walls are there for a reason though, right? They keep things from falling apart.”

— Meredith Russo

25. “I have, in some ways, cleaved to stereotypes and even bent rules to make Amanda’s trans-ness as unchallenging to normative assumptions as possible.”

— Meredith Russo

26. “What if your son told you he was your daughter?”

— Meredith Russo

27. “You can’t have art if you spend all your time forgetting pain.”

— Meredith Russo

28. “I’ve been waiting eight years to get you in a dress,” Layla said, locking her gaze on Chloe determinedly. “You’re in my world now.” “Whatever,” Chloe replied. “I want Taco Bell.”

— Meredith Russo

29. “Bravery means I had a choice.”

— Meredith Russo

30. “His shadow stretched out past mine. I remembered Mom telling me how frightening men were, all men really, how helpless it often felt to be a woman among men, and for the first time I understood what she meant.”

— Meredith Russo

31. “Transitioning had reawakened it a little, but it was hard to place too much hope in a God so many people said hated me.”

— Meredith Russo

32. “Amanda’s life and identity would be just as valid if she didn’t figure herself out until later in life, or if she were a tomboy, or if she were bisexual or a lesbian or asexual, or if she had trouble passing, or if she either could not or chose not to get “bottom” surgery.”

— Meredith Russo

33. “The cicadas buzzed persistently in the growing dusk. I had read once that they lived underground for most of their lives, only emerging as adults to live out their final days. Was that going to be me? Was I going to live underground for the better part of my life, never coming out into the world? They.”

— Meredith Russo

34. “There are enough people waiting to crap in your cereal without you doing it for them.”

— Meredith Russo

35. “I bury my face in the crook of his neck and laugh at nothing in particular, at how funny the world can be, at how weird it is that he’s a boy. How weird it is that he’s a boy.”

— Meredith Russo

36. “More likely, and more complicated, is the thought that she’s just gone, and that this letter is the last part of her I’ll ever see or touch, and the only afterlife she or anyone ever gets is the ripples their lives make in the world around them – heaven in the hearts of those who live on, love branching out like roots in an old-growth forest.”

— Meredith Russo

37. “What I deserved and what I could expect from life were two different things.”

— Meredith Russo

38. “I’ll be damned if that isn’t an addictive idea, being small with someone you trust.”

— Meredith Russo