18 Quotes by Daisy Johnson

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.

The understanding pity of others is a hole.

If brains are houses with many rooms then I live in the basement.

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.

Your attention is the same as the ray from a lighthouse. I am struck dumb beneath it.

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.

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.

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

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.