Daisy Jones & The Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

There’s this peace that comes with knowing you have a person in the world who would do anything for you, that you would do anything for.

I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of fucking story.

Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.

That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.

I didn’t want to read contracts and pay attention to who I was supposed to pay what money to and what was expected of me. I wanted to write songs and get high.

You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.

I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?

It’s not my responsibility to not turn them on. It’s their responsibility to not be an asshole.

walked in the door and the kids were asleep and Camila was sitting in the rocking chair watching the TV on low volume and she looked up at me. I started apologizing and she said, “You’re sober, right?”

And you know…no crowd cheering, no magazine cover ever made me feel even remotely as important as Camila.

think people that are too similar…they don’t mix well. I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was just like me. I don’t believe in soul mates anymore and I’m not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I’d believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn’t, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who’s suffering from the same stuff you are.

We are talking about probably the first man in my life who really saw me, who ever really understood me, who had so much in common with me…and he still didn’t love me. When you find that rare person who really knows who you are and they still don’t love you… I was burning.

I’m saying that when you really love someone, sometimes the things they need may hurt you, and some people are worth hurting for.

But loving somebody isn’t perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it’s a gut punch. That’s why it’s a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else’s. It’s sacred.

They say the first year of marriage is the hardest and I really took that to heart back then. I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to…I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace. And you know what? Even if I did know that, I don’t know that I would have been ready to welcome it or value it.

I thought about trying to force her into rehab. But you can’t do that. You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.

All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.

I can’t think of any two things that make you quite as self-absorbed as addiction and heartbreak.