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Daisy Johnson QUOTES

Daisy Johnson QUOTES

1 " The understanding pity of others is a hole. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

2 " This year something else is the terror. The road edging away and then dropping from sight, the judder judder judder as we move from tarmac to dirt. Is Mum crying? I don’t know. Should we ask? No answer to that and, anyway, the house is there now and no time to go back or try again or do things over. This the year we are houses, lights on in every window, doors that won’t quite shut. When one of us speaks we both feel the words moving on our tongues. When one of us eats we both feel the food slipping down our gullets. It would have surprised neither of us to have found, slit open, that we shared organs, that one’s lungs breathed for the both, that a single heart beat a doubling, feverish pulse. "

― Daisy Johnson , Sisters

3 " I was the same as you: less a person and more a hole cut away from everything. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

4 " If I was kidnapped would you offer yourself in my place? If a double was here would you know it wasn't me? If I lost a limb would you cut off one of yours? There is only ever, of course, one answer. Yes, I say. I know I would. "

― Daisy Johnson , Sisters

5 " Salma had read books where couples kissed, spoke in platitudes or come-ons; something about to happen, hinted at. Beyond that there was always only a white space on the page. A gap between paragraphs. She had thought often about what went on there. On the other side, when the letters appeared once more, couples smoke and drank tea or dressed one another or themselves. If there was a book to be written about Margot it should be blank; it would be those sex spaces between lines, sucked clean of words. "

― Daisy Johnson , Fen

6 " Memory had a habit of erasing, leaving only the most necessary. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

7 " Anything can be lost if you try hard enough. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

8 " La Casa ha muri portanti. Ecco cosa portano: l'infinita tristezza di mamma, gli scatti d'ira di Settembre, la mia muta incapacità di fare tutto quello che gli altri mi chiedono di fare, le stagioni, la morte dei piccoli animali nella macchia qui intorno, ogni parola d'amore o di rabbia che ci diciamo l'un l'altra. "

― Daisy Johnson , Sisters

9 " Settembre è la persona che avrei sempre voluto essere. Io sono una forma ritagliata dall'universo, trapunta di stelle che continuano a morire - e lei è la creatura che riempie il vuoto che io lascio nel mondo. "

― Daisy Johnson , Sisters

10 " Yes. I think then, as I have so many times, she is the person I have always wanted to be. I am a shape cut out of the universe, tinged with ever-dying stars- and that she is the creature to fill the gap I leave in the world. "

― Daisy Johnson , Sisters

11 " The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as words, memory loss, nightmares. They are the way we sometimes wake with a pressure on our chests that is animal-like or turn on a light and see someone we'd thought was long gone standing there looking at us. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

12 " The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bedside lamp, certain everything we’ve built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognize us but we will always recognize them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we can find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

13 " But sometimes I wonder if you are right and if all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

14 " I'd always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all these years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

15 " You cannot lie down behind your badly made decisions and call them fate or determinism or god. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

16 " Forgetting is, I think, a form of protection. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

17 " She has always known that houses are bodies and that her body is a house in more ways than most. "

― Daisy Johnson , Sisters

18 " Her parents. Her genetic parents. All their genes inside her wreaking secret havoc. People give more to their children than hair and eye colour, don't they? Children are a map of genes. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under

19 " Grief is a house with no windows or doors and no way of telling the time. "

― Daisy Johnson , Sisters

20 " Death has worn you smooth as a stone. "

― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under