Ani DiFranco Quotes

They put you in your place, and they tell you to behave
But no one can be free until we're all on even grade.

when I was four years old
they tried to test my I.Q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong
but when I was 13 years old
I woke up one morning
thighs covered in blood
like a war
like a warning
that I live in a breakable takeable body
an ever-increasingly valuable body
that a woman had come in the night to replace me
deface me
see,
my body is borrowed
yeah, I got it on loan
for the time in between my mom and some maggots
I don't need anyone to hold me
I can hold my own
I got highways for stretchmarks
see where I've grown
I sing sometimes
like my life is at stake
'cause you're only as loud
as the noises you make
I'm learning to laugh as hard
as I can listen
'cause silence
is violence
in women and poor people
if more people were screaming then I could relax
but a good brain ain't diddley
if you don't have the facts
we live in a breakable takeable world
an ever available possible world
and we can make music
like we can make do
genius is in a back beat
backseat to nothing if you're dancing
especially something stupid
like I.Q.
for every lie I unlearn
I learn something new
I sing sometimes for the war that I fight
'cause every tool is a weapon -
if you hold it right.

We are made to bleed and scab and heal and bleed again and turn every scar into a joke. We are made to fight and fuck and talk and fight again and sit around and laugh until we choke.

I love my country, by which I mean I am indebted joyfully to all the people throughout its history, who have fought the government to make right. Where so many cunning sons and daughters, our foremothers and forefathers came singing through slaughter, came through hell and high water so that we could stand here, and behold breathlessly the sight; how a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light. Why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of respect for those that fought for this?

Get ready: The truth is too valuable to put safety first. Get set: No amount of exposure is unbearable unless you let it be. Go: If you get caught with your pants down, take ’em off.

The seed of a tree falls from the safety of its branch onto concrete. Another finds ground but there is no rain. Another is chewed up and eaten by an animal. Another is so lucky as to sprout but then is thwarted under a falling log. None of these things is a tree. The seedlings of animals, including humans, are no less voluminous and their deaths no more tragic. This process of selection is repeated naturally and necessarily for every actualized human being as for every mighty oak. For every tree in the forest, there are thousands of tree dreams deferred. To pull out the hearse and have a funeral for every aborted fetus is indicative of

For a girl, the fear of not being pretty is the fear of not being a valuable object, which is the fear of not being loved. It is a conflation that is instilled so early on and runs so deep that, even when you know it's a fear perpetrated by patriarchy, goaded by fashion magazines, and used to manipulate you into buying stuff, you still can't stop the way it affects you. Being a woke feminist doesn't mean you've overcome it, it just means you've learned to live with your perpetual self-loathing and your anger around it, too.

I did not design this game; I did not name the stakes. I just happen to like apples; and I am not afraid of snakes.

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
-Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)

So I walk like I'm on a mission cuz that's the way I groove.
I got more and more to do, I got less and less to prove.
It took me too long to realize that I don't take good pictures
Cuz I have the kind of beauty that moves.

They can call me crazy if I fail, all the chance that I need, is one-in-a-million and they can call me brilliant if I succeed.

"I can't remember the last time I read a book so brave- maybe never." Ani DiFranco about Skid Dogs by Emelia Symington-Fedy

Meanwhile, each and every aborted seed is simply hurled back into the infinite field of possibility, death not being an ending, but a life process. The first law of thermodynamics (one of the classical properties of our earthly existence) is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Why should humans be different? Where does the dream of life go when it is unable to manifest into a particular (temporary, finite) human form? It goes somewhere else. It goes into another, wanted, welcome, and supported form. It moves to the left and to the right

That trip to The City could not have lasted more than a few days, but because my universe exploded and was expanding at such a rapid speed, time stood still. Each experience imprinted itself on me like it would a newborn child. When I came home I think I called my mother and told her I was moving to New York and I think she said something to the effect of, “I trust your judgment.” It took me a few years, but eventually, that’s exactly what I did.