From all the books I have read in 2020, I must say, My Dark Vanessa very easily rose up to become one of my favorites. Which is why I want to dedicate a post just for all the quotes I love in My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell.

My Dark Vanessa is a novel that explores the intricacies of teacher/student romance relationship. However, My Dark Vanessa offers readers the ability to see this usually “taboo” story through a different point of view. A point of view where, instead of being forced to engage in sexual activities, the student actually wants to do it. And instead of throwing off the blame the second shit hits the fan, the student stepped up and take the blame onto herself.

This novel gave me a lot to think about, of ways how we––the society––sometimes jump to conclusion too quickly based on what we’re taught to believe as morally just or otherwise. My Dark Vanessa made me wonder, maybe a lot of the stories where the villains are painted as one aren’t exactly as black and white as we thought it to be. Maybe, instead of the surety of black and white, of rights and wrongs, we’re all living in shades of grey.

Feel free to press play:

When Strane and I met, I was fifteen and he was forty-two, a near perfect thirty years between us. That’s how I described the difference back then—perfect.

Vanessa, you were young and dripping with beauty.

You were teenage and erotic and so alive, it scared the hell out of me.

He said he wanted to kiss me. He touched me. Every interaction between us is tinged now with something potentially ruinous, and it isn’t fair for him to pretend otherwise.

“We’re born, we live, we die,” he says,

“and the choices we make in the middle, all those things we agonize over day after day, none of those matter in the end.”

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.”

Fifteen years old is a strange thing, a real paradox. That in the middle of your adolescence, you’re the bravest you’ll ever be because of how the brain works at this age, the combination of malleability and arrogance.

I’ll remember everything as hard as I can.

I’ll live inside these memories until I can see him again.

Vanessa, I wonder if you remember me, last November, moaning into your soft warm lap, “I’m going to ruin you”?

My question for you now is, did I? Do you feel destroyed?

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.

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