On the Savage Side Quotes

“My dear.” Mamaw cupped Daffy’s face in her old hands. “A witch is not a pointy hat or a broom or warts. A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man. That’s why they burned her. They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy. But there are some things that not even fire can destroy. One of those things is the strength of a woman. Don’t you want to be a woman like that? A woman with power?”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“The first sin was believing we would never die. The second sin was believing we were alive in the first place.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“All the roads here are not graveled in rock, girls, but with the woman’s scars, because only a woman’s scars are strong enough to bear something driving over them, again and again.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“A witch is not a pointy hat or a broom or warts. A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man. That’s why they burned her. They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy. But there are some things that not even fire can destroy. One of those things is the strength of a woman. Don’t you want to be a woman like that? A woman with power?”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“Then my mother will sit and wait, getting high enough to know there is little space between the past and the present. In that space, maybe I really will come back home to her. She will think this because it was my promise. But I will never come back home. I’m too dead to do a thing like that.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“Things have changed for you now, Arc. You’ve got to be like the Grand Canyon. Make your hurt disappear. But not your heart. You’ve got to protect that from your own bitterness that will come for you now.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“Sometimes joy hides,” I said. “You just have to find it. That’s all it’s doing now. It’s hiding, and we’ll find it.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“I wish they knew how hard it is to love a child you can’t find. You love her for everything she was. Everything she wasn’t. Everything she might never get to be.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“What makes you happiest?” Mamaw Milkweed asked. “I know.” Daffy raised her hand as if we were in school. “You and yarn and flower bulbs and turtles and dancing cats and Arc.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“Her hands may be old,” I said, “but they’re strong as boot heels.” How could they not be? They scrubbed pots and folded sheets, pulled weeds up from the ground and planted flower bulbs in the same hole. They built things, cleaned things, cooked things, tore things apart, and put them back together again in better ways. They moved things, lifted things, and bandaged them, like the cuts my sister and me got when we decided to fly off the tree in the backyard. In the quiet moments, her hands would hold our faces as she gave us ten kisses apiece. “Enough for you to always find your way back home,” she’d say.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

“Let’s get her to say that in a whisper,” Daffy herself whispered. “And then we’ll keep it like a secret.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side

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"Hai gli occhi di una vedova". "Non sono mai stata sposata". "Non è questione di essere stati sposati o meno. Sono gli occhi di chi ha perso l'amore per darsi alla morte. (...) Ecco cosa sei, quando ti guardo da vicino. Lo stesso albero, ma diverso”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Sul lato selvaggio

“When I grow up, Mamaw Milkweed,” Daffy would say, “I’m gonna have my own flower bulb catalog and mail them to you so you can buy from me. Every flower that blooms will be because I gave ’em to the world.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, On the Savage Side