23 Quotes by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I just really need it to be a love story.

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.

I'm a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so long I can fly for miles. I'm the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.

(..) time feels flat , like it's folded onto itself over and over, a piece of paper into a crane.

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.

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.

The question slices a painless cut, shockingly clean.

I want the moments before sex. I want him to take care of me.

At the end of class, he stops me on my way out the door and hands me my essay on Lavinia from Titus Andronicus. I focused on her torn-out tongue and torn-off hands, her subsequent silence, the failure of language in the face of rape.