Joanna Newsom Quotes

Water were your limbs
And the fire was your hair
And then the moon caught your eye,
and you rose through the air.
Well if you've seen true light,
then this is my prayer:
Will you call me
When you get there?

Love is not a symptom of time.
Time is just a symptom of love

And never will I wed.
I'll hunt the pearl of death to the bottom of my life,
and ever hold my breath,
till I may be the diver's wife.

I may have changed, it's hard to gauge
Time won't account for how I've aged
Would that I could tie your lying tongue
Who says that leaving keeps you young.

In the folds and the branches,
somewhere, out there,
I was only just born into open air.
Now hush, little babe.
You don’t want to be
down in the trenches,
remembering with me,
where you will not mark my leaving,
and you will not hear my parting song. Nor is there cause for grieving.
Nor is there cause for carrying on.

I know we must abide
each by the rules that bind us here:
the divers, and the sailors, and the women on the pier.

Driven through by her own sword,
summer died last night, alone.

While yonder, wild and blue,
the wild blue yonder looms.
'Till we are wracked with rheum,
by roads, by songs entombed.

We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, as all things, fades.

I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.

By the time you read this
I will be so far away
Daddy longlegs, how in the world
Am I to be expected to stay?

Well, Nabokov is definitely my favorite author, though I feel strange calling him an "influence," since I can't trace the ways in which his writing may or may not have seeped into my own. But I also love William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kenneth Patchen, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mark Helprin (who wrote a beautiful book called Winter's Tale), and Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite book of all time is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

I killed my dinner
with karate
kicked him in the face,taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do.

And a thimble's worth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.

Well I'm starvin' and freezin'
In this measly old bed
(Then I'll crawl across the salt flats
To stroke your sweet head)
Come across the desert,
with no shoes on?
(I love you truly,
or I love no-one)