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.

Simone: I was the only one encouraging her to make something of herself with her talent. Everybody else just tried to make something of themselves with what she had.

I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of fucking story.

I used to say I was born broken. She was born whole.

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

What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.

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

I always knew kids weren’t in the cards for me. I think it’s a feeling you get. I think you have it in your heart or you don’t. And you can’t put it in your heart if it’s not there. And you can’t pull it out of your heart if it is. And it was in Camila’s heart.

I don’t like putting it that way—you’re never not yourself. You’re always you. It’s just, sometimes, who you are…who you are is a shitty person.

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.

No amount of advice or lectures or trying to chain somebody down ever stopped anyone who didn’t want to stop in the first place.

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

I was so used to being given things that I didn’t know how important it is for your soul to earn them.

Something tells me men don’t do that same thing. When they are standing there, threatening a woman, I doubt they count every wrong step they made to become the asshole they are. But they should.

It is what I have always loved about music. Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words—the emotions, and the stories, the truth—that you can let flow right out of your mouth. Music can dig, you know? It can take a shovel to your chest and just start digging until it hits something.

People say that life keeps moving, but they don’t mention that it does stop sometimes, just for you.

When you have everything, someone else getting a little something feels like they’re stealing from you.

I am not going to sit around sweating my ass off just so men can feel more comfortable. It’s not my responsibility to not turn them on. It’s their responsibility to not be an asshole.

“It’s like some of us are chasing after our nightmares the way other people chase dreams.”

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.

It hurts to care about someone more than they care about themselves.

Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

And I liked that. The idea that just by being me, I was doing all right.

“Write a list of things you’ll regret/I’d be on top smoking a cigarette.” I loved that line.

But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself.

Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.

She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself. And that’s what Daisy did, with that song. At least for me.

But the only reason people thought I had everything is because I had all the things you can see. I had none of the things you can’t.

“Nothing I wouldn’t do/to go back to the past and wait for you.”

it scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.

History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing. And I was proud of what I did.

Art doesn’t owe anything to anyone. Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, not whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time.

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.

Do you know what you do with that level of trust? When someone says, “I trust you so much I can tolerate you having secrets”? You cherish it. You remind yourself how lucky you are to have been given that trust every day.

if she knew how often I was thinking about her, she wouldn’t feel lonely.

“And that’s you?” I said. She said, “That’s me. And no matter where we are, no matter what time of day it is, the world is dark and we are two blinking lights. Flashing at the same time. Neither one of us flashing alone.”

But music is never about music. If it was, we’d be writing songs about guitars. But we don’t. We write songs about women. Women will crush you, you know? I suppose everybody hurts everybody, but women always seem to get back up, you ever notice that? Women are always still standing.

Here’s a lesson for everybody, take it from me: Handsome men that tell you what you want to hear are almost always liars.

You have to have one person in your life that you know would never do anything to steer you wrong. They may disagree with you. They could even break your heart, from time to time. But you have to have one person, at least, who you know will always tell you the truth.

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.

when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.

Everything that made Daisy burn, made me burn. Everything I loved about the world, Daisy loved about the world. Everything I struggled with, Daisy struggled with.

We were two halves. We were the same. In that way that you’re only the same with a few other people. In that way that you don’t even feel like you have to say your own thoughts because you know the other person is already thinking them.

Passion is…it’s fire. And fire is great, man. But we’re made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive. My family was my water. I picked water. I’ll pick water every time.

No matter who you choose to go down the road with, you’re gonna get hurt. That’s just the nature of caring about someone. No matter who you love, they will break your heart along the way.

You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.

Denial is like an old blanket. I loved to get on under that thing and curl up and sleep.

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.

But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.