Ani DiFranco Quotes

But as bad as I am, I'm proud of the fact that I'm worse than I seem

Feminism is not only for women It's something everyone can participate in, and evolve together, as the first step in the right direction. I see feminism as a tool to achieve that balance and peace.

Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

The bathroom mirror has not budged, the woman who lives there can tell the truth from the stuff they say and looks me in the eye- says do you prefer the easy way? No? Well ok then, dont cry.

I speak without reservation, from what I know and who I am. I do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voices to the chorus whether the result is harmony or dissonance. The worldsong is a colorless dirge without the differences that distinguish us, and it is that difference which should be celebrated not condemned.

My writing just kind of exists out there in the air-it's all sort of intended as spoken, or sung, word. So, to commit them to the page ... that way was kind of intimidating to me, yet intriguing, to try to reflect the rhythms and connotations and emotions that you can deliver, speaking-wise, on a page.

Now let's get talking: reefer madness. Like some arrogant government can't, By any stretch of the imagination, outlaw a plant.

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me ... ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like ... junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs.

I'm sounding out the silence, avoiding all the words.

I was attracted to a lot of different art forms - dancing, painting. But there's something about music that people hold so close. It's such a powerful art form, and that's why I live for it.

I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap.

If you get caught with your pants down, take 'em off.

When I was like sixteen, I was a total chick I had big hair. I was seen as this attractive girl, and I would get all this attention. And then I just cut off my hair, and I quit playing that game.

I do believe that music has an intense power to connect us together, to inspire us to become ourselves.

If you're not angry, then you're just stupid, you don't care. How else can you react when something's so unfair?

Before Katrina, you didn't see criticism of the Bush administration in the media. Here they are, stealing elections, enacting illegal wars, huge crimes against humanity and democracy, and you didn't even see criticism. It wasn't until Katrina that people started to come down on them.

Like how could you do nothing,
and say, 'I'm doing my best.'
How could you take almost everything,
and then come back for the rest?
How could you beg me to stay,
reach out your hands and plead,
and then pack up your eyes and run away
as soon as I agreed?

There are so many things that we have to be very concerned about. But I always come back to feminism.

I'm searching, as we all are, for ways to feel good about myself. Certainly, looking in the mirror doesn't do it!

There's a paradox in every paradigm.

As any mom knows, having a baby is an extremely creative act and to love and create a baby, it's on par with any other creative act that we could come up with.

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)

All of youth culture is packaged and sold back to us at this furious rate these days. I think it's part and parcel to this corporate encroachment on our lives in general.

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 am not an angry girl, but it seems I've got everyone fooled. Every time I say something they find hard to hear, they chalk it up to my anger and not to their own fear. Imagine you're a girl just trying to finally come clean, knowing full well they prefer you dirty and smiling.

Somedays the line I walk turns out to be straight - Other days the line tends to deviate.

First decide what you got to do, then go out and do it. All we can do is to see each other through it.

What I like about being independent [in the music industry] is that anybody who does play the album on the radio and anybody who does choose to write in the media does so because they want to, because they like it or because they find something interesting there, not because they have to.

And this vague little smile is my all purpose expression the meaning of which I will leave to your discretion.

If you want to challenge the system, don't go to bed with it.

I was supposed to be cool about this, yeah, I remember - cool was the plan. Tried to keep it all under wraps, but the wraps kept going slack. I keep turning round, I keep coming back.

You're trying to fight gravity on a planet that insists that love is like falling, and falling is like this.

I knew naturally as a child not to forfeit my creativity to a world that's all laid out for me. I'll look at everything around me and vow to keep in mind that alla this is just someone's idea. It could have just as well been mine.

A good brain ain't diddley, if you don't have the facts.

Love sets fire to your schedule, And then calls an end to time.

I just hope it was okay, I know it wasn't perfect, I hope in the end we can laugh and say it was all worth it.

I always feel I have to take a stand,
And there's always someone on hand
To hate me for standing there.
I always feel I have to open my mouth,
And every time I do, I offend someone, somewhere.

I basically get stereotyped a lot in terms of being a girl and writing 'chick' music for teenage girls or something. I think, if anything, the press kind of, because of my gender and my age, tends to kind of relegate my work to this sort of special-interest group. It's part of the cultural dynamic, I guess.

For every hand extended another lies in wait. Keep your eye on that one girl ... anticipate.

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.

They say that the truth will set you free But then again, so will a lie ... It depends if you're trying to get to the promised land Or if you're just trying to get by.

You've decided to love me for eternity, I'm still deciding who I want to be today.

I build each one of my days out of hope
and I give that hope your name

'cause I know there is strength
in the differences between us
and I know there is comfort
where we overlap

come here
stand in front of the light
stand still
so I can see your sillouette
I hope
you have got all night
'cause I'm not done looking,
no, I'm not done looking yet

Taking me seriously is a big mistake. I certainly wouldn't.

God forbid you be an ugly girl, 'course too pretty is also your doom, 'cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room

People used to make records, as in the record of an event, the event of people playing music in a room, and now everything's cross-marketing, its about sunglasses and shoes, or guns and drugs that you choose.

I can't wait to get back to New York City where at least when I walk down the streat, no one ever hesitates to tell me exactly what they think of me.

I would like to perfect the art of being studiously aloof

We barely have time to react in this world, let alone rehearse.

It don't take a weather man to look around and see the weather, Jeb said he'd deliver Florida folks and boy did he ever, and we hold these truths to be self evident number one George W Bush is not president. Number two America isn't a true democracy. And number three the media is not fooling me.

These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.

Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.

We are wise women, we are giggling girls. We both carry a smile to show when we're pleased, we both carry a switchblade in our sleeves.

It makes me really sad that women have been ejected from the seat of their power in this society in terms of what happens around childbirth. In other parts of the world, there are places where women can't drive a car, but they're still in charge of childbirth ... The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women do. I find it metaphorically resonant that a pregnant woman looks like she's just sitting on a couch, but she's actually exhausting herself constructing a human being. The laborious process of growing a human is analogous to how 'women's work' is seen.

Smile pretty, and watch your back

And what if there are no damsels in distress?
What if I knew that, and I called your bluff?
Don't you think every kitten figures out how to get down,
whether or not you ever show up?

My life may not be something special But it's never been lived before.

I'm not one of those people who has an act.

What makes you so lavish that you can afford to spend every sober moment feeling angry and bored?

Birth is the epicenter of women's power

Someone's got to be interested in how I feel, just because I'm here and I'm real.

My parents split up when I was young, and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.

Taken out of context, I must seem so strange

Then I show up steady ready and proud and I find I've forgotten how to talk out loud. Isn't it just like you to bring me to my knees?

My music doesn't really sound like punk music, it's acoustic. And it doesn't really sound like folk music 'cause I'm thrashing too hard and emoting a little too much for the sort of introspective, respectful, sort-of folk genre thing. I'm really into punk and folk as music that comes out of communities and is very genuine and very immediate and not commercial.

Goldfish have no memory, I guess their lives are much like mine. And the little plastic castle is a surprise everytime.

And god help you if you are an ugly girl course too pretty is also your doom cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room and god help you if you are a pheonix and you dare to rise up from the ash a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy while you are just flying back

But in the garden of simple, where all of us are nameless, you were never anything but beautiful to me.

The windows of my soul are made of one-way glass, don't bother looking into my eyes if there's something you want to know, just ask

I don't need anyone to hold me, I can hold my own.

We get a little further from perfection,
each year on the road,
I guess that's what they call character,
I guess that's just the way it goes,
better to be dusty than polished,
like some store window mannequin,
why don't you touch me where i'm rusty,
let me stain your hands

Those who call the shots are never in the line of fire.

I don't care if they eat me alive, I've got better things to do than survive.

I fight with love and i laugh with rage ... you gotta live light enough to see the humor, and long enough to see some change ...

I make such a good statistic, somebody should study me now; somebody's gotta be interested in how I feel, just cause I'm here, and I'm real.

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

Imagine you're a girl,
just trying to finally come clean,
knowing full well they'd prefer you
were dirty and smiling.

Promiscuity does not scare me as long as she is savvy and self possessed when puberty comes to call. My aim is to simply raise my daughter to be secure in her self worth and capable of happiness all on her own.

Why do you think I write these feminist songs, to try and teach myself to respect myself. You know, it's not because I'm a hero.

Some people wear their smile like a disguise. Those people who smile a lot, watch their eyes. I know 'cause I'm like that a lot. You think everything's ok, and it is ... 'till it's not.

Take away our play stations and we are a third world nation.

Words are some of the most powerful and important things I know ... Language is the tool of love and the weapon of hatred. It's the bright red warning flag of danger
and the stone foundation of diplomacy and peace.

A lot of women these days, a lot of young women don't want to call themselves feminists. You have this cheap, hideous 'girl power' sort of fad, which I think is pretty benign at best, but at worst, I think it's a way of taking the politics out of feminism and making it some kind of fashion.

TIME is not a thing that's ours to lose.

Squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
And I'm beyond your peripheral vision
So you might want to turn your head
Cause someday you might find you're starving
and eating all of the words you said.

I am still praying for revolution.

I never try to imagine the future. I kinda think it's a waste of time. I live in the now.

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

We are wise, wise women. We are giggling girls.

In order to keep anything cultural, logical, or ideological, you have to reinvent the reality of it.

I turned my pain into art and my hard work into a career. Helping myself has helped others. helping others has helped me.

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

A lesson must be lived in order to be learned and the clarity to see and stop this now that is what i've earned

These days, my main guitar amps have been Magnatone. They're beautiful. Magnatones have actual tremolo, which I recently learned about guitar amps. Often what guitar amps call vibrato is really just a volume Up and Down. But Magnatone has a true vibrato, which is pitch bending. And so, it's just a lush sound.

I like to be an inspiration and an example of the idea that you can be independent, and it's no problem, and you can pay your rent, and it's empowering, and it's great. And that's true, but it also takes a really long time, and you have to have a lot of patience and a lot of conviction in why you want to remain independent.

I did a lot of work with myself over the course of being pregnant and the first few months of being pregnant. It's nice, the pace of being pregnant; it gives you a long time to not just germinate a baby but germinate the mother that you're gonna be.

I love to exercise my creativity in many ways but as each year of specialization goes by I feel further and further from my other creative selves. I used to be able to see myself doing many things and sometimes I still long for a job that involves less pressure and grappling with people but, as you say, I am one of the lucky ones so I try to just focus on feeling lucky and carry on!

Outside sleep's open window, between the drops of rain, history is writing a recipe book for every earthly pain.

The world is my oyster.
The road is my home.
And I know that I'm better off
Alone.

When I need to wipe my face, I use the back of my hand, And I like to take up space just because I can, And I use my dress to wipe up my drink. I care less and less what people think.