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21 " 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. "
― Daisy Johnson , Everything Under
22 " Your attention is the same as the ray from a lighthouse. I am struck dumb beneath it. "
23 " 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
24 " She has always known that houses are bodies and that her body is a house in more ways than most. She housed those beautiful daughters, didn’t she, and she has housed depression all through her life like a smaller, weightier child, and she housed excitement and love and despair and in the Settle House she houses an unsettling worry that she finds difficult to shake, an exhaustion that smothers the days out of her. "
25 " I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no. "
― Daisy Johnson , Fen
26 " the thought stays with me through the quiet night. That we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees. "
27 " You crouch by the water and drop your hands into its cold rush until you touch the stony bottom. People, you tell me one day, who grow up around water are different to other people. "
28 " People, you tell me one day, who grow up around water are different to other people.What do you mean by that? I say. But you won't answer or have forgotten you said anything to begin with. Still, the thought stays with me through the quiet night. That we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees. "
29 " Virginity was a half-starved dog you were looking after, wanted to give away as quickly as possible so you could forget it ever existed. "
30 " Mostly she is just a mother to us and she is in rooms the way chairs and tables are. "
31 " The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. "
32 " I don't remember much of what happened on the river. Forgetting is, I think, a form of protection. "
― Daisy Johnson
33 " She was alive; she was so alive then that she stole living from those around her. "
34 " A volte penso alle tracce dei nostri ricordi. mi chiedo se restano sempre uguali o se le riscriviamo, col tempo. "
35 " I luoghi dove siamo nati ci diventano estranei. Non ci riconoscono più, anche se noi li riconosceremo per sempre. Ci sono cresciuti dentro, sono il nostro midollo. Se ci rovesciassero come un guanto, troverebbero delle mappe incise dietro la pelle. "
36 " 51.7519°N 1.2578°W "
37 " My sister is a black hole my sister is a bricked-up window my sister is a house on fire my sister is a car crash my sister is a long night my sister is a battle my sister is here. September "
38 " 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 recognise us but we will always recognise 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 could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you. "
39 " She had us with a man she had been afraid of, although she would not tell us why. There were months when she spoke little, only wanted to often be holding us, ordered takeaways, had baths that lasted all afternoon. There were months when she told us she was living in a sadness the color of rust and leather. "
40 " I wondered, in that moment, what it was like to be a mother to children who did not need you. "