michele ✡︎

“The water, too, was still, and I thought, what liars they are, the sky and the water. Still and calm and clear, like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, and really, it never would be again.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,” he said. “Because it is an enemy to thee.”

The balcony scene. Too mistrustful to guess at the meaning, I said, “Don’t do that, James, please—right now can we just be ourselves?”

He crouched down, lifted the mangled script from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s easier now to be Romeo, or Macbeth, or Brutus, or Edmund. Someone else.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto 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”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa