Quotes from If I Was Your Girl

Meredith Russo ·  280 pages

Rating: (17.3K votes)


“For as long as I could remember, I had been apologizing for existing, for trying to be who I was, to live the life I was meant to lead.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“You can have anything,” she said, “once you admit you deserve it.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I know it hurts. I know it hurts so bad you can barely breathe sometimes. I know because I’ve been there. Please don’t leave us. I promise life can be good, and we need you too much.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I wasn’t sorry I existed any more. I deserved to live. I deserved to find love. I knew now – I believed, now – that I deserved to be loved.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I’m not brave,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Bravery implies I had a choice. I’m just me, you know?” I”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl



“Hell, even the straight people have enough skeletons in their closet to fill a tomb. Everybody’s too afraid of going to hell or getting made fun of to be honest about what they want and who they are, so they can’t even really admit what they want to themselves.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I have a past, okay? And you really don't want to get involved with it.'
'Everybody's got a past,' he said. 'That doesn't mean you can't have a future.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“You tried to kill yourself,” she said, rolling her eyes up to heaven and biting her knuckle. “Andrew Hardy was gonna die one way or the other, and one of the choices gave me a daughter in exchange while the other left me with no one.” “I”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I’ve seen trans people in movies and TV shows, but judging by how unrealistic and shitty bi characters tend to be, I’m gonna assume I know nothing. So what’s okay for me to ask?”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I wondered when I’d reach the end of things I didn’t know. *”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl



“There are enough people waiting to crap in your cereal without you doing it for them.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“How much of life was like that, just waiting for me to come and give it a chance.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“You can have anything once you admit you deserve it.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“Amanda’s life and identity would be just as valid if she didn’t figure herself out until later in life, or if she were a tomboy, or if she were bisexual or a lesbian or asexual, or if she had trouble passing, or if she either could not or chose not to get “bottom” surgery.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“God wanted me to live, and this was the only way I knew how to survive, so this was what God wanted.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl



“You know walls are there for a reason though, right? They keep things from falling apart.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“Just 'cause I'm bi doesn't mean I have magic powers. I'm not the plucky queer sidekick in your romantic comedy.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“Just because you have a past doesn't mean you can't have a future.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I wondered if joy could ever be felt by itself without being tainted with fear and confusion, or if some level of misery was a universal constant, like the speed of light.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“Being a girl in this world means being afraid. That fear'll keep you safe. It'll keep you alive.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl



“I have, in some ways, cleaved to stereotypes and even bent rules to make Amanda’s trans-ness as unchallenging to normative assumptions as possible.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“Radical faith means you trust that the Lord visited these weaknesses and sorrows on you as part of His plan...”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“As I spoke I thought back to what Virginia had said weeks before, about getting anything you wanted if you let yourself believe you deserved it. For as long as I could remember, I had been apologizing for existing, for trying to be who I was, to live the life I was meant to lead. Maybe this would be the last conversation I would ever have with Grant. Maybe not. Either way, I realized, I wasn’t sorry I existed anymore. I deserved to live. I deserved to find love. I knew now—I believed, now—that I deserved to be loved.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“that you think makes you so complicated couldn’t make me”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“There is no wrong way to express and embody your most authentic self!”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl



“I like him a lot.... I think I might love him. And it obviously isn't everything, but being the way I am has been a huge part of my life. It's easy to act like my past never happened, but it feels like I've put up this wall around my heart.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“[S]omething had to change. Because I had changed.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“I thought of going the rest of my life pretending I sprang to life from nothing at sixteen years old and felt my cheeks flush with shame and anger. I was so tired of cowering. I was so tired of hiding. I wanted to tell the truth, to say it out loud.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


“His shadow stretched out past mine. I remembered Mom telling me how frightening men were, all men really, how helpless it often felt to be a woman among men, and for the first time I understood what she meant.”
― Meredith Russo, quote from If I Was Your Girl


About the author

Meredith Russo
Born place: in The United States
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Popular quotes

“The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically —and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing the senses in human odors. To become utterly human, the compassionate fiend incarnate, the locksmith of the great door leading beyond and away and forever isolate.
Men founder like ships. Children also. There are children who settle to the bottom at the age of nine, carrying with them the secret of their betrayal. There are perfidious monsters who look at you with the bland, innocent eyes of youth; their crimes are unregistered, because we have no names for them.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Sexus


“Grey sat in his bedchamber, unshaven and attired in his nightshirt, banyan, and slippers, drinking tea and debating with himself whether the authoritative benefits conferred by wearing his uniform outweighed the possible consequences - both sartorial and social - of wearing it into the slumps of London to inspect a three-day-old corpse.”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Lord John and the Private Matter


“We shall miss Leopardstar. I remember her from all the way back when I was an apprentice in ThunderClan. I always respected her, and, though her loyalty to RiverClan never wavered, she was a leader who understood the importance of keeping every Clan strong. She had the heart, courage, and strength of the mighty cat she was named for.”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Fading Echoes


“To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.”
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“Lastly, ''Hang tough!'' Never, ever give up regardless of the adversity. If you are a leader, a fellow who other fellows look to, you have to keep going.”
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