Top 50 Tiffany McDaniel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can imagine anything you want in the dark. You can imagine your father loves you, you can imagine your mother is not disappointed, you can imagine that you are... significant. That you mean somethin’ to someone. That’s all I ever wanted, Fielding. To matter. That is all I’ve ever wanted.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

2. “People always ask, Why does God allow suffering? Why does He allow a child to be beaten? A woman to cry? A holocaust to happen? A good dog to die painfully? Simple truth is, He wants to see for Himself what we’ll do. He’s stood up the candle, put the devil at the wick, and now He wants to see if we blow it out or let it burn down. God is suffering’s biggest spectator.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

3. “Being the devil made him a target, but it also meant he had a power he didn’t have when he was just a boy. People looked at him, listened to what he said. Being the devil made him important. Made him visible. And isn’t that the biggest tragedy of all? When a boy has to be the devil in order to be significant?”

— Tiffany McDaniel

4. “The snake has had its victories over me. And in its victories I am no longer sweet nor gentle.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

5. “Even the devil’s heart isn’t just for beating.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

6. “Being the devil made him important. Made him visible. And isn’t that the biggest tragedy of all? When a boy has to be the devil in order to be significant?”

— Tiffany McDaniel

7. “A foolish mistake, it is, to expect the beast, because sometimes, sometimes, it is the flower’s turn to own the name.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

8. “Sometimes the things we believe we hear are really just our own shifting needs.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

9. “Breathed was the combination of flower and weed, of the overgrown and the mowed. It was Appalachian country, as only Southern Ohio can be, and it was beautiful as a sunbeam in waist-high grass.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

10. “I look back and think of all the ways he wasn’t the devil in that moment. The devil would break a dog’s neck, not cradle it in his own. The devil would have a mouth comparable to a crate of knives, not a mouth with teeth that held the curves of marshmallows. I think of all the devils I’ve seen in my long life. I know now how brief the innocent, how permanent the wicked. I.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

11. “I tried to count my moles once. The same flat ones she had and which she called chocolate chips. When I was a real small kid, I actuallly believed the moles were chocolate chips and that if she stood too close to the oven, they’d melt away, so I’d tug on her apron strings and she’d laugh as I led her from the heat.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

12. “I’m the devil. No one tells me when to stay and when to leave. But it sure is nice to be wanted. I tell you, Fielding, it sure is nice to be wanted in this very place.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

13. “It’s just sometimes you don’t say nothin’ for so long, you forget why ya shut up in the first place.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

14. “A girl comes of age against the knife, Betty.” She softly tucked my hair behind my ears before kissing me on the forehead. “But the women she becomes must decide if the blade will cut deep enough to rip her apart or if she will find the strength to leap with her arms out and dare herself to fly in a world that seems to break like glass around her. May you have the strength.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

15. “No one ever said you’ve got to prepare to be hated. You’ve got to prepare for the yelling and the anger. You have got to prepare how to survive being the guilty one, even in innocence.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

16. “A snake that could harm you, you don’t have much choice to kill. You wouldn’t be able to leave a cobra in your sock drawer. But a snake that is no threat will greatly define the man who decides to kill it anyways.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

17. “My heart is made of glass and if I ever lose you, Betty, my heart will break into more hurt than eternity would have time to heal.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

18. “You know, Fielding, the thing about breaking something that no one much thinks about is that more shadows are created. The bowl when intact was one shadow. One single shadow. Now each piece will have a shadow of its own. My God, so many shadows have been made. Small little slivers of darkness that seem at once to be larger than the bowl ever was. That’s the problem of broken things. The light dies in small ways, and the shadows- well, they always win big in the end.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

19. “It would do none of us any good, runnin’ an evil off like we’re too weak and too scared to take care of our own problems. As if we zero in bravery and sword. We can’t forget, we are the lords of our own ’round here, and we alone hiss back the serpent.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

20. “I once heard someone refer to Breathed as the scar of the paradise we lost. So it was in many ways, a place with a perfect wound just below the surface.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

21. “I learned at that moment that the devil, the true one, is people...”

— Tiffany McDaniel

22. “The heaviest thing in the world is a man on top of you when you don’t want him to be.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

23. “If looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul. A boy whose black crayon would be the shortest in his box.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

24. “If the devil was going to come, I expected to see the myth of him. A demon with an asphalt shine. He’d be fury. A chill. A bad cough. Cujo at the car window, a ticket at the Creepshow booth, a leap into the depth of night.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

25. “Fear is ignorance’s first shadow. After.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

26. “I know the sins of everyone who comes to hell. That’s part of my misery. To know and feel theirs.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

27. “I had come to realize that buried secrets are just seeds that grow more sin.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

28. “Our hair, in its rib-cage shape, fell in a blackness that wisdom calls night. Its winding way was a narrative of the hills, it was the snakes swimming the river, the crow strapped with worms.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

29. “Pain is our most intimate encounter. It lives on the very inside of us, touching everything that makes us. It claims your bones, it masters your muscles, it reels in your strength, and you never see it again. The artistry of pain is its content. The horror of it is the same.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

30. “The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat had not. It should’ve been expected, though. Heat is, after all, the devil’s name, and when’s the last time you left home without yours?”

— Tiffany McDaniel

31. “My father’s hands were soil. My mother’s were rain. No wonder they could not hold one another without causing enough mud for two. And yet out of that mud, they built us a house that became a home.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

32. “A girl comes of age against the knife. She must learn to bear its blade. To be cut. To bleed.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

33. “But in life, you either live in someone else’s house or you build your own. A man with hands like my father’s was a man who had built his home out of star and sky. He had held on to the throb of life and abandoned comforts. You can’t do that sort of thing and not expect your hands to get dirty. That’s how you know you’re doing it right.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

34. “Between God and Devil, our family tree grew with rotten roots, broken branches, and fungus on the leaves.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

35. “It occurred to me then that to be a child is to know the cradle rocks both toward the parent and away from them. That is the ebb and flow of life, swinging toward and away from one another, perhaps so we build up the strength for that one moment we will be rocked so far away, the person we love the most is gone by the time we return.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

36. “I realized then that not only did Dad need us to believe his stories, we needed to believe them as well. To believe in unripe stars and eagles able to do extraordinary things. What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny we did not feel cursed to.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

37. “The earth is warm enough.’ Nature speaks to us. We just have to remember how to listen.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

38. “Funny that ‘she’ should be in ‘sheet,’ ain’t it? I reckon it’s just another way to lay on a woman and get away with it.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

39. “I realized then that pants and skirts, like gender itself, were not seen as equal in our society. To wear pants was to be dressed for power. But to wear a skirt was to be dressed to wash the dishes.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

40. “But I had learned that just because time has moved forward, it does not mean something so terrible ever gets easier to bear.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

41. “The two wolves live inside all of us,” Dad had said. “They fight until one of them is killed.” When I asked him which wolf lives, he said, “The one you nourish and love.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

42. “She was born to a woman as telling as a dream and to a man who was a Cherokee, a moonshiner, and a mythmaker.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

43. “What do you do when the two people who are supposed to protect you the most are the monsters tearing you to pieces?”

— Tiffany McDaniel

44. “She certainly didn’t look like Dresden, the girl who in her simple beauty could make two boys give her the wind.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

45. “Imagine havin’ wings, Betty. There wouldn’t be nothin’ too high. Nothin’ you wouldn’t be able to get to the top of. You can’t fall with wings. God wasted ’em on birds and bats. He should have given wings to us.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

46. “You readers have all the power. It’s not the agents or the editors or the publishing houses as a whole that determine a writer’s career. It’s the readers. Without readers buying books, there are no novelists to be had. Readers give meaning to an author’s words. So if you like a book, tell everyone you know. Be that book’s champion because if you do, you’re being a champion for the author themself.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

47. “Fraya says it means you’re a woman.” “Why we have to bleed to earn it?” Flossie slammed her fists on the mattress. “What happens when we get old and it stops? What then? We stop bein’ a woman? Ain’t the blood that defines us. It’s our soul.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

48. “The glow of a cigarette in the dark. All the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the infinite edges. It’s all in the small glowin’ tip of a cigarette in the hand of a man leanin’ back against a wall, watchin’ a girl walk by on her way home, knowin’ she’ll never get there.”

— Tiffany McDaniel

49. “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

50. “I realized then that the whole time I thought I’d been walking alone, my father had been with me. Supportin’ me. Steadyin’ me. Protectin’ me, best he could. I knew I had to be strong enough to stand on my own two feet. I had to step out of my father’s hands and pull myself up out of the mud. I thought I would be scared to walk the rest of my life without him, but I know I’ll never really be without him because each step I take, I see his handprints in the footprints I leave behind.”

— Tiffany McDaniel