ahensfin

“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

“And I seem to have such strength in me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, " I exist". In thousands of agonies - I exist. I'm tormented on the rack - but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar - I exist!! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights