clara

“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

“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, My Dark Vanessa

“Well, I always tell my girls that it's better to mistrust people at first rather than trust them, and it's safer to suspect people of evil intentions rather than good  ones...It sounds rather hard but we've got to be women of the world, haven't we?”
― Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa