Joni Mitchell Quotes

They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.

He saw my complications and he mirrored me back simplified, and we laughed how our perfect world would always be denied.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

I wish I had a river I could skate away on?

The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy.

I didn't think I had much of a following in the south. I thought I was anonymous down there so I kept to the south. I found in certain pockets that I was quite recognizable, and I just hit a wig store.

We call for the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones, artifice, brutality, and innocence.

Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

I get the urge for going/But I never seem to go,

Keep a good heart. That's the most important thing in life. It's not how much money you make or what you can acquire. The art of it is to keep a good heart.

Do you see how you hurt me, baby? So I hurt you too. Then we both get so blue. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, looking for the key to set me free.

She'll prophesy your death. She won't say when.

I never loved a man as far as I could pitch my shoe.

The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.

Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.

Innocence is drowned in anarchy. The best lack conviction given time to think, and the worst are full of passion without mercy.

Love is touching souls.

They'll crucify you for staying the same, and they'll crucify you for change. I'd rather be crucified for changing.

I lost my daughter at 21. I had to give her up because I was broke, no place to take her, no money to take her. That was very traumatic.

People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me - they're too personal.

Fold your fleet wings I have brought some dreams to share
A dream that you love someone
A dream that the wars are done

Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.

My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.

Musically, I would never run dry. Any time I sit down to an instrument, I could write a song.

I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.

They used to laugh at me when I refused to ride on all those double decker buses, all because there was no driver on the top.

I believe that I am male and I am female.

The rock & roll industry is very incestuous, and we have all been close at one time or another. A lot of beautiful music and a lot of beautiful times came from that. A lot of pain, too, because, inevitably, different relationships broke up.

We'll laugh and toast to nothing, and smash our empty glasses down.

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

The bands and the roadies, love 'em and leave 'em. It's pleasure to try 'em, but trouble to keep 'em.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

I try not to steal from myself, but the modalities create similarities.

You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.

All romantics meet the same fate some day.
Drunk and cynical and boring someone in some dark cafe.

What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.

Freedom to me is a luxury of being able to follow the path of the heart, to keep the magic in your life. Freedom is necessary for me in order to create, and if I cannot create I don't feel alive.

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

I was only a folk singer for about two years ... . By that time, it wasn't really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people get nervous about that word. Art. They think it's a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, ... the word art has never lost its vitality.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

You feed it all your woes, the ghostly garden grows.

The coming of the kids hasn't come out in my art yet.

You snipe so steady, you snub so snide, so rip and ready to diminish and deride.

My life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television.

There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

I'm drinking champagne, got the head phones up high, can't numb you out.

Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm. They cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable, or mineral.

Oh, the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling. It's the unraveling and it undoes all the joy that could be.
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Sex sells everything and sex kills.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

I couldn't see passion as a bad thing.

I love you when I forget about me.

That's a woman-hating scene.

I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy.

I'm a method actress in my songs, which is why it's hard to sing them.

My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.

Unlike some of my peers, I haven't really hit a writer's block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick.

Rolling Stone hates me. They must have an editorial policy to do me in for many years.

If you see yourself as a kingly type, then you need your serfs and your army and someone around you.

Fear is like the wilderland - Stepping stones or sinking sand

I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. And it isn't vague, it strikes against the very nerves of their life and in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.

My parents told me I'd point to a bed of flowers and say 'Pink. Pretty,' before I knew any other words.

White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.

I dreamed I saw the bombers riding shot gun in the sky and they were turning into butterflies above our nation.

All the news of home you read, more about the war and of bloody changes.

The only thing I have to give to make you smile, to win you with, are all the mornings still to live.

I live in a box of paints
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid

I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along, I wanna belong to the living. Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive, Wanna wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive.

I assume there must be some kind of genetic thrust. My two grandmothers were very different, but both of them were frustrated musicians.

Does the moon play only silver when it strums the galaxy?

I am as constant as a northern star

I don't know if I've learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could've rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn't place much value on depth - we don't have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn't encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That's reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity - the uncertainty of whether or not you're truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I've seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.
But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called 'The End of Sex,' that said something that struck me as very true. It said: "If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one." What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories - and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.
You can't do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.

When I began experimenting, people weren't ready for it. Once it's in its second and third generational stages, people can accept it.

I create by feeling rather than by intellectualizing.

When I felt that fame, people were nosing me out, well I moved on. I used traveling names. Wigs, if necessary.

Daydreamin' drugs the pain of living.

I thrive on change. That's probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They'll be going along on one key and I'll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

Van Gogh was impulsive.

I am a woman of heart and mind, looking for affection and respect, a little passion.

You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you're still young at heart.

People were very protective of me. Overly so. I was in the industry for a long time before I had any idea of what drugs people were doing.

I do have this reputation for being a serious person.

During times like these, the wise are influential.

Because Elvis gave 'em cars, you think I'm cheap.

Won't you stay We'll put on the day And we'll talk in present tenses

My husband had an education. He had a degree in Literature. I married into a camp of literary types.

My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.

Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn't know what she was singing about.

Fame is a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name.

Peridots and periwinkle blue medallions
Gilded galleons spilled across the ocean floor
Treasure somewhere in the sea and he will find where
Never mind the questions there's no answer for
The roll of the harbor wake
The songs that the rigging makes
The taste of the spray he takes
And he learns to give
He aches and he learns to live
He stakes all his silver
On a promise to be free
Mermaids live in colonies
All his sea dreams come to me

City satins left at home I will not need them
I believe him when he tells of loving me
Something truthful in the sea all lies will find you
Leave behind your streets he said and come to me
Come down from the neon lights
Come down from the tourist sights
Run down till the rain delights
You do not hide
Sunlight will renew your pride
Skin white by skin golden
Like a promise to be free
Dolphins playing in the sea
All his sea dreams come to me

Seabird I have seen you fly above the pilings
I am smiling at your circles in the air
I will come and sit by you while he lies sleeping
Fold your fleet wings I have brought some dreams to share
A dream that you love someone
A dream that the wars are done
A dream that you tell no one but the gray sea
They'll say that you're crazy
And a dream of a baby
Like a promise to be free
Children laughing out to sea
All his sea dr

You've got to keep the child alive; you can't create without it.

I don't know how to sell out. If I tried to sell out I don't think I could.