Vanessa Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Vanessa. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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)
She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Byrn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me.
Gayle Forman (Where She Went (If I Stay, #2))
People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
My happiest memories have no place in the past; they are those I have yet to create.
Ellen Hopkins (Impulse (Impulse, #1))
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)
Anyone can grow into something beautiful.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
It's both creepy and out of my control, this ability I have to notice so much about other people when I'm positive no one notices anything at all about me.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
She didn't understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn't agree to.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
How much strength does it take to hurt a little girl? How much strength does it take for the girl to get over it? Which one of them do you think is stronger?
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Common thistle is everywhere,” she said. “Which is perhaps why human beings are so relentlessly unkind to one another.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Clayton," she said softly, her voice threaded with tears, "when Vanessa asked about my accomplishments tonight, I forgot to mention that I do have one. And it's--it's so splendid that it compensates for my lack of all the others." Stephen and Clayton grinned at each other, neither of them hearing the emotion that clogged her voice. "What splendid accomplishments is that, little one?" Clayton asked. Her shoulders hunched forward and began to shake. "I made you love me," she whispered brokenly. "Somehow, some way, I actually made you love me.
Judith McNaught (Whitney, My Love (Westmoreland, #2))
In that moment, we were the same, each of us destroyed by our limited understanding of reality.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
My wife's the reason anything gets done, she nudges me towards promise by degrees. She is a perfect symphony of one our son is her most beautiful reprise. We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they're finished songs and start to play. When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised--not one day. This show is proof that history remembers. We live in times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall and light from dying embers--remembrances that hope and love last longer. And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. I sing Vanessa's symphony. Eliza tells her story. Now, fill the world with music, love, and pride.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
He's always going to be old. He has to be. That's the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Exhaling in resignation, Vanessa drew her sword, offered a silent prayer for Starke’s safety, and uttered, “Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.” 
Stephen A. Reger (Storm Surge: Book Two of the Stormsong Trilogy)
It's always times like these when I think of you and I wonder if you ever think of me.
Vanessa Carlton
Well, I'm stubborn and wrong, but at least I know it.
Vanessa Carlton
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.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
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)
Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, 270  My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest My Admirable butterfly! Explain How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane, Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade?
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. I sing Vanessa's symphony. Eliza tells her story. Now, fill the world with music, love, and pride.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
He’s the only person who ever understood that desire. Not to die, but to already be dead.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
I want to be strong and empowered. I want to shock everybody.
Vanessa Hudgens
There must be a point where you’re allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Suddenly, it's all too much. Bryn and the bump watch. Vanessa with my high school yearbook. The idea that nothing's sacred. Everything's fodder. That my life belongs to anyone but me.
Gayle Forman (Where She Went (If I Stay, #2))
I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
An older man using a girl to feel better about himself - how easily the story becomes a cliché if you look at it without the soft focus of romance
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Over time, we would learn each other and I would learn to love her like a mother loves a daughter, imperfectly and without roots.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
God, what if TMZ got hold of the truth about me? What a liar I am, I mean? What kind of role model am I? I make Vanessa Hudgens look like Mother Freaking Teresa. Minus the whole nudity thing. Because I'm not about to take naked photos of myself and send them to my boyfriend.
Meg Cabot (Forever Princess (The Princess Diaries, #10))
This time, there was no escape, I could not turn away, could not leave without accepting what I had done. There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
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.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
It wasn't as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead, it seemed that...expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility instigated a transformation.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
If you need to run, always imply that you'll return.
Vanessa Len (Only a Monster (Monsters, #1))
Yeah, Vanessa. I also call her Red, Viper, Princess, and behind her back, Woman-who’s-driving-me-fucking-insane.
Gina L. Maxwell (Rules of Entanglement (Fighting for Love, #2))
I believe you can prove everyone wrong, too, Victoria. Your behavior is a choice; it isn't who you are.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
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
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Believe me, Being gay is not a choice. Noone would choose to make life harder than it has to be.
Jodi Picoult (Sing You Home)
Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and If I didn’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
I´m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Vanessa…” He trailed off with a frown. The next three sentences we shared between the two of us were going to be the last thing I thought about when I went to bed later that night. “You’ve been with me for two years, but I figure I’m barely beginning to understand,” the big guy claimed, his expression solemn. “Understand what?” “I should probably be scared of you.
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
My worst habit, according to my mother, is how I deflect compliments with self-deprecation. I need to learn how to accept praise. It boils down to confidence, she says, or lack thereof.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
-Vanessa ¿quién diablos es ese tipo y por qué no me estoy besuqueando con él en este momento?
Adri G.M. (La elevación (Los dominios del Ónix Negro, #1))
I felt my true, unworthy self to be far away from his clutching grasp, hidden from his admiring gaze.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Here you are, obsessed with romantic language-a language invented for expression between lovers-and you use it to spread animosity.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
I walked into his classroom. I existed. I was born.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
My wife's the reason anything gets done, She nudges me toward promise by degrees. She is a perfect symphony of one, Our son is her most beautiful reprise. We chase the melodies that seem to find us Until they're finished songs and start to play When senseless acts of tragedy remind us That nothing here is promised, not one day. This show is proof that history remembers We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall and light from dying embers Remembrances that hope and love last longer. And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story Now fill the world with music, love and pride.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
The heart of a woman will never be found in the arms of a man.
Vanessa Carlton
men who claim to be turned on by strength but can only handle women who act like girls.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
if people belonged together in the true timeline, then our timeline tries to repair itself by bringing them together.
Vanessa Len (Only a Monster (Monsters, #1))
You're not Forsaken. You're Chosen for Purpose.
Vanessa Richardson (The Certain Ones: You're not Forsaken. You're Chosen for Purpose.)
I think we should probably get Vanessa out of the Quiet Box to help us. What do you guys say?' 'Absolutely,' Newel affirmed. 'Best idea I've heard all day.' 'I'll second that,' Doren said gladly. Seth gave the satyrs a doubtful scowl. 'Wait a minute. You guys just think she's pretty.' 'I've been around a long time,' Newel said. 'Vanessa Santoro is not jut pretty.' 'He's right,' Doren agreed. 'She's walking dynamite. My pulse is rising just talking about her.' 'She also might be a traitor,' Seth stressed. 'The lethal temptress,' Newel said with relish. 'Even better.' 'It will definitely spice up the adventure,' Doren encouraged. 'I'm obviously talking to wrong guys,' Seth sighed. 'Believe me,' Newel said cockily. 'you're talking to the right guys. We've been chasing babes since the world was flat.' Seth rolled his eyes.
Brandon Mull (Keys to the Demon Prison (Fablehaven, #5))
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.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
I would keep her, and raise her, and love her, even if she had to teach me how to do it.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Now, as an adult, my hopes for the future were simple: I wanted to be alone, and to be surrounded by flowers. It seemed, finally, that I might get exactly what I wanted.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Do you really think you’re the only human being alive who is unforgivably flawed? Who’s been hurt almost to the point of breaking?
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
It takes a strong person to say sorry, and an ever stronger person to forgive.
Vanessa Guzman
Now when we touch each other, the world doesn’t even notice. I know there should be freedom in that, but to me it only feels like loss.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
It’s just that I’m depraved, my mind so warped by Strane that I misinterpret innocent favoritism as sexual interest.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
You're a hero and I'm a monster", she whispered. "There's only one way that story ever ends.
Vanessa Len (Only a Monster (Monsters, #1))
For eight years I dreamed of fire. Trees ignited as I passed them; oceans burned.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Being a highlighter is about constantly searching for the good in people. When you tell people they are good, they become better. When you search for what’s good, you feel great.
Vanessa Van Edwards (Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People (Portfolio Non Fiction))
I can see myself at the head of my own classroom, telling my own students what to read and write. Maybe that's what this has always been about - not wanting these men but wanting to be them.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Her eyes were open, taking in my tired face... Her face twitched into what looked like a squinty smile, and in her wordless expression I saw gratitude, and relief, and trust. I wanted, desperately, not to disappoint her.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
With the sun on my face and a dog at my side, I have so much capacity for good.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
The pain on the inside is what keeps you human,' she said. 'Never forget that.
Taylor Stevens (The Doll (Vanessa Michael Munroe, #3))
The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.
Vanessa Veselka (Zazen)
Siempre me gustaron las personas con cicatrices, como los árboles. De hecho, desconfío de las personas que pasados los cuarenta no tienen ninguna.
Vanessa Montfort (Mujeres que compran flores)
I am not waiting. I am not waiting for anyone any more. It was me I was waiting for.
Priya Parmar (Vanessa and Her Sister)
Does he really believe he’d ever go to prison, a Harvard-educated, well-spoken white man?
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously, as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
You should see the way she smiles when I rattle off the names of the orchids in the greenhouse: oncidium, dendrobium, bulbophyllum, and epidendrum, tickling her face with each blossom. I wouldn't be surprised if 'Orchidaceae' was her first word.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
I force my eyes upward and look at Mia for the first time. She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Bryn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me. Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. The scar on her left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red weld is silvery pink now. Almost like the latest rage in tattoo accessories. Almost pretty.
Gayle Forman (Where She Went (If I Stay, #2))
The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn't like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn't know why. My parents thought I was abnormal, I was pretty sure. They said I wasn't, but you don't get sent to a therapist if you're normal. Sometimes we really aren't supposed to be the way we are. It's not good for us. And people don't like it. You've got to change. You've got to try harder and do deep breathing and maybe one day take pills and learn tricks so you can pretend to be more like other people. Normal people. But maybe Vanessa was right, and all those other people were broken too in their own ways. Maybe we all spent too much time pretending we weren't.
Kenneth Oppel (The Nest)
But people like the doll guy who sells women and the dog guy who buys women, and other guys who, say, rape women, or maybe don’t go as far as violent rape but treat women like objects instead of people—sure, there’s a difference in the level of crime, but it’s all the same thing, where women become a canvas for throwing emotional baggage, Jackson Pollock style.
Taylor Stevens (The Doll (Vanessa Michael Munroe, #3))
Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure.
Vanessa Wu (Love Has No Limits)
The nine other students pack up their things and leave the classroom to carry on with their lives, to practices and rehearsals and club meetings. I leave the room, too, but I'm not part of them. They're the same, but I'm changed. I'm unhuman now. Unthetered. While they walk across campus, earthbound and ordinary, I soar, trailing a maple-red comet tail. I'm no longer myself; I am no one. I'm a red balloon caught in the boughts of a tree. I'm nothing at all.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
When you try to be the same as everyone else, it’s boring. When you try to fit into a mold, you become forgettable. When you try to be “normal,” you become dull. Just be yourself, because no one is like you. If you’re a little weird, own it. The right people will like you for it.
Vanessa Van Edwards (Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People (Portfolio Non Fiction))
It’s easy to pinpoint when it all started, that moment of walking into his sun-soaked classroom and feeling his eyes drink me in for the first time, but it’s harder to know when it ended, if it really ended at all. I think it stopped when I was twenty-two, when he said he needed to get himself together and couldn’t live a decent life while I was within reach, but for the past decade there have been late-night calls, him and me reliving the past, worrying the wound we both refuse to let heal.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
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. I loved the math of it, three times my age, how easy it was to imagine three of me fitting inside him: one of me curled around his brain, another around his heart, the third turned to liquid and sliding through his veins.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture. But this one? He'd watched her. Studied her. Observed what maybe even Uncle, the reader of people, had missed. This one was already fractured, and the lines between her broken pieces were not fissures but scar material stronger than whatever had once filled those spaces.
Taylor Stevens (The Doll (Vanessa Michael Munroe, #3))
Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
Can I ask what’s upsetting you?” I take a breath, try to work out the words, but after a moment I shake my head. “It’s too big to explain,” I say. Because it’s about more than my poem being bad, or that I can’t pick a study spot without exhausting myself. It’s a darker feeling, a fear of there being something wrong with me that I won’t ever be able to fix.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)
She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh (The Language of Flowers)
Thanks for putting me in bed last night,” I said, watching the swift line of his throat as he yawned again. He grumbled, “Uh–huh,” as he rolled his shoulders before slipping his arms beneath the covers again. “And for giving me a massage.” I had already tried moving my legs, and sure they were sore, but I knew how much worse they could be. I’d done everything I was supposed to do to help prevent the stiffness, but there was only so much a body that wasn’t 100 percent to begin with could handle. “There wasn’t much to massage.” Uh. “What’s the supposed to mean?” “I have more muscles in my glutes than you have in your thighs.” Anyone who had seen Aiden’s ass would know that was a fact, so I wasn’t going to take it personally. Maybe because I was still so sleepy, I raised my eyebrows at him and said, “Have you seen your butt? That’s not an insult. It has more muscles in it than most people have all over their bodies.” His own thick eyebrows rose about a millimeter, just slightly but enough for me to notice. “I didn’t know you paid that much attention to it.” “Why do you think you have so many female fans?” Aiden let out another low groan, but he didn’t tell me to stop. “You could raise a small fortune if you ever auctioned off the chance for a person to take a—” “Vanessa!” Mr. Proper reached over to throw a hand over my mouth, like he was shocked. That big hand literally covered me from ear to ear, and I burst out laughing though it was muffled. “You make me feel cheap,” he said as he slowly pulled his hand away, but the shine in his eyes said he didn’t really mind it that much. I stretched my own limbs with a yawn. “I’m just telling you what anyone else would.” “No, no one else would ever say that to me.” So he had a point. “Well, I’ll tell you the truth then.” He made this noise that had me rolling to face him again. “You always have
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
I’m so fucking tired of this,” I whisper. Ruby’s crouching on the floor in front of me, her hands on my shoulders, the first time she’s ever touched me. “What are you tired of?” she asks. “Hearing him, seeing him, everything I do being laced with him.” We’re quiet. My breathing steadies and she stands, her hands dropping away from me. Gently, she says, “If you think back to the first incident—” “No, I can’t.” I throw my head against the back of the chair, press myself into the cushion. “I can’t go back there.” “You don’t have to go back,” she says. “You can stay in the room. Just think of one moment, the first one between the two of you that could be considered intimate. When you look back on that first memory, who was the initiator, you or him?” She waits, but I can’t say it. Him. He called me up to his desk and touched me while the rest of the class did their homework. I sat beside him, stared out the window, and let him do what he wanted. And I didn’t understand it, didn’t ask for it. I exhale, hang my head. “I can’t.” “That’s fine,” she says. “Take it slow.” “I just feel . . .” I press the heels of my hands into my thighs. “I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to 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.” She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa)