Ani DiFranco Quotes

and half of learning to play is learning what not to play
and she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say
and she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her moves
and make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove

she crawls out on a limb and begins to build her home
and it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not alone

up up up up up up up points the spire of the steeple
but god's work isn't done by god
it's done by people

I don't always feel lucky, but I'm smart enough to try.

When we patch things up,
They say a job well done.
But when we ask the question why
Where did the rips come from?,
They say we are subversive,
And extreme, of course.
We are just trying to track a problem to its source.

Music was an entry point, like a passport or a key that allows you through an invisible portal into the beating heart of the world. The collective heart that unites us . . . (in a unified field of consciousness, in the bodily experience of being animals in time) and also into the hearts of individuals . . . (into that person and that person). Music showed itself to me as a fractal way in.

Maybe you can keep me from never being happy, but you're not going to stop me from HAVING FUN!

I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off.

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.

If you're not getting happier as you get older, then you're fuckin' up

opinion and perception and to be allowed to live and express those perceptions is at the supposed core of the American state. Reproductive freedom must be understood as a civil right.

Sometimes the beauty is easy.
Sometimes you don't have to try at all.
Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake.
Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.

I mean, what
What if no one's watching
What if when we're dead
We are just dead
I mean, what
What if it's just us down here
What if God is just an idea
Someone put in your head

Taken out of context, I must seem so strange

How come I can pick my ears but not my nose?

The world owes us nothing; we owe each other the world.

My country tis of thee,
To take swings at each other on talk-show TV.