Daisy Johnson > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“You cannot lie down behind your badly made decisions and call them fate or determinism or god.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“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

“I was the same as you: less a person and more a hole cut away from everything.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“Forgetting is, I think, a form of protection.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“She has always known that houses are bodies and that her body is a house in more ways than most.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“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

“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

“Memory had a habit of erasing, leaving only the most necessary.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“Grief is a house with no windows or doors and no way of telling the time.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“Death has worn you smooth as a stone.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“The understanding pity of others is a hole.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“Mostly she is just a mother to us and she is in rooms the way chairs and tables are.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“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.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“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

“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

“I am vulnerable to superstitions and fairy tales, the pockets of weirdness smattering the land.”
― Daisy Johnson, Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

“Anything can be lost if you try hard enough.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“I wondered, in that moment, what it was like to be a mother to children who did not need you.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“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.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“The Settle House is load bearing. Here is what it bears: Mum's endless sadness, September's fitful wrath, my quiet failure to ever do quite what anyone needs me to do, the seasons, the death of small animals in the scrublands around it, every word that we say in love or anger to one another.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“Your attention is the same as the ray from a lighthouse. I am struck dumb beneath it.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“She was alive; she was so alive then that she stole living from those around her.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“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

“I have felt tired too, since we left school; some days it is as if I am carrying a second body draped over my shoulders.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“My sister is a black hole my sister is a falling tree my sister is the sea.”
― Daisy Johnson, Sisters

“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