Top 100: Daisy Jones & the Six Quotes with Page Numbers

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Last updated on April 4th, 2024

If you’re familiar with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s writing, you’ve likely come across so many memorable quotes in the Daisy Jones & the Six book, that you probably ran out of colored book tags like I did.

In this blog post, I’ve curated the top 100 quotes from this international bestseller, along with their page numbers for easy reference (the page numbers coincide with the paperback version).

Feel free to use the table of contents below to skip to your favourite characters.

Image sources for this post: LACEY TERRELL/PRIME VIDEO

Quotes about Daisy Jones

Before we dive into the words of wisdom from the main characters, here are some quotes from the characters talking about our protagonist, Daisy Jones.

We love broken, beautiful people. And it doesn’t get much more obviously broken and more classically beautiful than Daisy Jones. ~ Elaine Change (biographer, author of Daisy Jones: Wild Flower – page 8)
Everybody saw her. Your eye went right to her. If the rest of the world was silver, Daisy was gold. ~ Simone Jackson (page 11)
And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good. Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good. ~ Billy Dunne (page 188)
She’s going to be the girl bleeding in a beautiful dress until it kills her. ~ Simone Jackson (page 182)
You know how every once in a while you’ll meet somebody who seems to be floating through life? Daisy sort of floated through the world, oblivious to the way it really worked. I suppose I probably should have hated her for it, but I didn’t. I loved her for it. Because it meant she was less inclined to take the shit I’d been taking for years now. ~ Karen Sirko (page 94)

Daisy Jones Quotes

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

DAISY JONES

Page 16

I wore what I wanted when I wanted. I did what I wanted with who I wanted. And if somebody didn’t like it, screw ’em. (page 94)
I run hot and I always have. 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. (page 156)
I used to care when men called me difficult. I really did. Then I stopped. This way is better. (page 161)
And I was the first person to say, “You’re only in charge of me as much as I’m in charge of you.” (page 151)

Quotes about Love

I learned about sex and love the hard way. That men will take what they want and feel no debt, that some people only want one piece of you. (page 10)
Here’s a lesson for everybody, take it from me: Handsome men that tell you what you want to hear are almost always liars. (page 237)
I really felt like I understood him. And I think he understood me. You know, things like that, that kind of connection with a person, it is sort of like playing with fire. Because it feels good, to be understood. You feel in sync with a person, you feel like you’re on a level that no one else is. (page 177)

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 wanted drugs and sex and angst. That’s what I wanted. Back then I thought that the other type of love…I thought that was for other types of people. Honestly, I thought that type of love didn’t exist for women like me.

(page 245)

I love you as much as I’m willing to love anybody. (page 15)
People say it’s hard to be away from the people you love but it was so hard to be right next to him. (page 309)
Write a list of things you’ll regret/I’d be on top smoking a cigarette. (page 201)
I’d tell you the truth just to watch you blush/but you can’t handle the hit so I’ll hold the punch. (page 299)

When you think of me, I hope it ruins rock ‘n’ roll. (page 221)

I was paying the price for the parts of himself that he didn’t like. (page 165)
I can’t think of any two things that make you quite as self-absorbed as addiction and heartbreak. I had a selfish heart. I didn’t care about anyone or anything but my own pain. My own need. My own aching. I’d have made anyone hurt if it could have taken some of mine away. (page 307)
I fell in love with the wrong guy who was exactly the right guy. (page 310)

Quotes about Music

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, 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 you hit something. (page 119)
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, no whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about it. (page 213)

When people asked me for my autograph, I used to write, “Stay Solid, Daisy J.” But when it was a young girl – which wasn’t often but it did happen from time to time – I used to write, “Dream big, little bird. Love, Daisy” (page 268)

I sounded like a cool new pair of jeans and Billy sounded like the pair you’ve had for years. (page 88)
It’s very vulnerable, being an artist, telling the truth like that, like we’re doing now. When you’re living your life, you’re so inside your head, you’re swirling around in your own pain, that it’s hard to see how obvious it is to the people around you. These songs I was writing felt coded and secret, but I suspect they weren’t coded and secret at all. (page 200)

Quotes about Drugs/Addiction

It’s not drugs that make you look old, it’s sobering up. (page 161)
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. And a lot of good dope can make it so you can’t tell whether you’re happy or not. (page 203)

It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity. And 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.

(page 278)

I knew getting high wasn’t a long-term solution. But God, it’s so easy. It’s just so easy. But of course, it’s not easy at all, either. Because one minute you’re just trying to nurse a wound. And the next, you’re desperately trying to hide the fact that you’re now a jury-rigged, taped-up, shortcutted mess of a person and the wound you were nursing has become an abscess. (page 203)
It seemed like there wasn’t anything about me, any truth that I could tell him, that he wouldn’t accept. Acceptance is a powerful drug. And I should know because I’ve done ’em all. (page 235)

Quotes about Simone & Daisy’s Friendship

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. ~ Daisy (page 14)
If she knew how often I was thinking about her, she wouldn’t feel lonely. ~ Simone (page 215)

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.

~ Simone (page 299)

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. ~ Simone (page 216)
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. ~ Daisy (page 242)

Quotes about Life

It was a big lesson for me when I was young—being given things versus earning them. I was so used to being given things that I didn’t know how important it is for your soul to earn them. If I can thank Teddy Price for anything—and to be honest, I have to thank him for a lot of things—but if I had to pick one it’s that he made me earn something. (page 81)
When you’re in a situation like that, when you have a man looming over you, it’s as if every decision you made to lead to that moment—alone with a man you don’t trust—flashes before your eyes. 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. (page 113)

It’s like some of us are chasing after our nightmares the way other people chase dreams. (page 164)

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. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that. Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror. (page 201)
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. (page 296)
Denial is like an old blanket. I loved to get on under that thing and curl up and sleep. (page 298)

Billy Dunne Quotes

When you really love someone, sometimes the things they need may hurt you, and some people are worth hurting for.

BILLY DUNNE

Page 214

Quotes about Love

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. (page 214)
When someone’s presence gives you energy, when it riles up something in you—the way Daisy did for me —you can turn that energy into lust or love or hate. I felt most comfortable hating her. It was my only choice. (page 131)

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. (page 289)

History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing. And I was proud of what I did. (page 213)
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. (page 215)

It hurts to care about someone more than they care about themselves. (page 181)

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 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. (page 288)

Quotes about Music

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. (page 202)

I don’t care if you’re a man, woman, white, black, gay, straight, or anything in between—if you play well, you play well. Music is a great equalizer in that way. (page 28)

It’s an album about the push and pull of stability and instability. It’s about the struggle that I live almost every day to not do something stupid. Is it about love? Yeah, of course it is. But that’s because it’s easy to disguise almost anything as a love song. (page 261)

Quotes about Drugs/Addiction

Drinking, drugging, sleeping around, it’s all the same thing. 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. (page 65)
That was the beginning of a bad time. Where I was not myself. Actually, no. 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. (page 62)

Sometimes I wonder if addicts aren’t all that different from anybody else, they are just better at lying to themselves. I was great at lying to myself. (page 70)

It wasn’t behind me. My addiction. I kept hoping it would feel like it was. Like I didn’t need to keep looking over my shoulder all the time. But that doesn’t really exist. At least not for me. It’s a fight you keep fighting, some times are easier than others. (page 164)
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. That really tripped me out, that everyone’s life was that precarious, that there wasn’t some all knowing mechanism in place that stopped that stopped things that shouldn’t happen from happening. That’s something that always scared me. (page 211)
You know, one of things you learn in recovery from addiction is that self-control is the only control we have. That all you can do is make sure your own actions are sound because you can’t control actions of others. (page 254)
I took a taste of it. Not even a sip, but a taste. It took everything I had not to gulp it down, not to throw it into the back of my throat. It tasted like comfort and freedom. That’s how it gets you—what it feels like is the opposite of what it is. (page 318)

Quotes about Life

You’re an underdog for so long and then one day you’re not. And when you start to feel real success, when you start to live large and all that, you have to stop and ask yourself if you think you really deserve it. (page 59)

Some people will never stop being themselves. And you think it drives you crazy but it is the very thing you will think about when they are gone. When you don’t have them in your life anymore. (page 284)

That’s the problem with people who don’t have to work for things. They don’t know how to work for things. (page 186)
When someone is out on a ledge like that, especially when you’re the one that coaxed them out there in the first place, you don’t dare do anything to unbalance them. (page 189)

Camila Dunne Quotes

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

CAMILA DUNNE

Page 76

I loved him and I knew he loved me. It wasn’t easy. But as my mother used to remind me, “You’ve never been interested in easy.” (page 33)
Love and pride don’t mix. (page 34)
Who the fuck do you think you are, cheating on me? You think there’s a woman alive who is better than what you have? (page 68)
You’re asking me if I knew he was going to be unfaithful as if that’s a thing that you know or you don’t know. Like it’s black and white. But it’s not. You suspect, then you sort of un-suspect. Then you suspect again. Then you tell yourself you’re crazy. Then you ask yourself whether fidelity is really something you value above all else. Let me put it this way: I’ve seen a lot of marriages where everyone is faithful and no one is happy. (page 65)

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. (page 290)

It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like. I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life—a family, a beautiful marriage, a home —with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water. (page 74)
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. (page 302)

Don’t count yourself out this early, Daisy. You’re all sorts of things you don’t even know yet. (page 320)

If I’ve given the impression that trust is easy – with your spouse, with your kids, with anybody you care about – if I’ve made it seem like it’s easy to do….then I’ve misspoken. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But you have nothing without it. Nothing meaningful at all. That’s why I chose to do it. Over and over and over. Even when it bit me in the ass. And I will keep choosing it until the day I die. (page 215)
A part of me wishes you wanted kids, because my kids make me so happy. But… I think in order to be happy like I’m happy, you need different things. And I want you to have whatever those things are. (page 302)

It’s us, our team, forever and always. And I will always root for us. (page 62)

I care about you because when I see you, I see an incredible writer—who suffers from the very thing that the man I love suffers from. The two of you think you’re lost souls, but you’re what everybody is looking for. (page 320)
I decided I don’t need perfect love and I don’t need a perfect husband and I don’t need perfect kids and a perfect life and all that. I want mine. I want my love, my husband, my kids, my life. I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong. (page 318)

Karen Sirko Quotes

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

KAREN SIRKO

Page 29

That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you. (page 37)
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. (page 60)
I was scared of living my life feeling like I’ve anchored myself to the wrong dock. (page 283)

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. (page 177)

Knowing you did the right thing doesn’t mean you’re happy about it. (page 302)
What I wanted didn’t fit in with having a husband. I wanted to be a rock star. And then I wanted to live alone. In a house in the mountains. And that’s what I’ve done. But if you get to be my age and you can’t look back at your life and wonder about some of your choices…well, you have no imagination. (page 331)

Graham Dunne Quotes

It’s the ones who never loved you enough that come to you when you can’t sleep. You always wonder what the future might have held and you’ll never know. Maybe you almost don’t want to know.

GRAHAM DUNNE

Page 330

People say that life keeps moving, but they don’t mention that it does stop sometimes, just for you. Just for you and your girl. The world stops spinning and just lets you two lie there. (page 145)
Actually, it wasn’t that fun, it was just that I was happy. Everything seems fun when you’re happy. (page 145)
When you have everything, someone else getting a little something feels like they’re stealing from you. (page 149)
Every man needs a man to look up to. (page 295)

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. (page 72)

I guess I’m saying…if you redeem yourself, then believe in your own redemption. (page 142)
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. (page 217)
You think that tragedy means that the world is over but you realize the world is never over. It’s just never over. Nothing will end it. (page 296)

Warren Rhodes Quotes

Let me tell you the sweet spot for being in rock ’n’ roll. People think it’s when you’re at the top but no. That’s when you’ve got the pressure and the expectations. What’s good is when everybody thinks you’re headed somewhere fast, when you’re all potential. Potential is pure fuckin’ joy.

WARREN RHODES

Page 32

Some people just don’t threaten each other. And other people threaten everything about each other. Just the way it is. (page 176)

Let me sum up that early tour for you: I was getting laid, Graham was getting high, Eddie was getting drunk, Karen was getting fed up, Pete was getting on the phone to his girl back home, and Billy was all five, at once. (page 67)

Quotes from other characters

The Chosen ones never know they are chosen. They think everyone gets a gold carpet rolled out for them. ~ Rod Reyes (page 148)

Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole. ~ Teddy Price (page 80)

There are A LOT of characters in this novel. For a complete breakdown of all the characters, including mind maps showing how they’re all related, check out the Daisy Jones character guide.

Taylor jenkins reid

Top 100: Daisy Jones & the Six Quotes with Page Numbers

Quotes about Daisy Jones

Daisy Jones Quotes

Quotes about Love

Quotes about Music

Quotes about Drugs/Addiction

Quotes about Simone & Daisy’s Friendship

Quotes about Life

Billy Dunne Quotes

Quotes about Love

Quotes about Music

Quotes about Drugs/Addiction

Quotes about Life

Camila Dunne Quotes

Karen Sirko Quotes

Graham Dunne Quotes

Warren Rhodes Quotes

Quotes from other characters

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