Ani DiFranco Quotes

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

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.

One of my rules is: Never TRY to do anything. Just do it.

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.

Maybe you don't like your job, maybe you didn't get enough sleep, well nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life, but you know, there's no escape, there's no excuse, so just suck up and be nice.

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.

Every time I say something they find hard to hear, they chalk it up to my anger, and never to their own fear.

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.

spring is super in the supermarkets and the strawberries prance and glow never mind that they're all kinda tart and tasteless as strawberries go meanwhile wild things are not for sale anymore than they are for show so i'll be outside, in love with the kind of beauty it takes more than eyes to know

We are taught to view pain as an enemy, not a teacher. But pain is the right hand of growth and transformation. Pain is in the history of all human wisdom.

Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society?

I wonder what you look like under your t-shirt. I wonder what you sound like when you're not wearing words. I wonder what we have when we're not pretending.

I know men are delicate origami creatures who need women to unfold them, hold them when they cry. But I am tired of being your savior and I am tired of telling you why.

Just let me go, we have to be able to criticize what we love, to say what we have to say 'cause if you're not trying to make something better, then as far as I can tell, you are just in the way.

I walk like I'm on a mission 'cause that's the way I groove. I got more and more to do and less and less to prove.

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

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

I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.

I don't take good pictures 'cause I have the kind of beauty that moves.

I used to be a superhero; no one could touch me, not even myself. You are like a phone booth I somehow stumbled into, and now look at me - I am just like everybody else.

Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'

I hope progressive ways of thinking will permeate the "mainstream" more and more in the coming years. Goddess knows we have endured a very long spell (thirty plus years) of regressive thinking and hyper conservativism dominating our culture and national discourse. It necessitates risk taking and rule breaking by people in all walks of life to swing that pendulum back though.

[Amy Ray and I] both have this part of our brain that makes us think that everybody should and will be nice and friendly and forthcoming. And then we're completely disillusioned. We have all these grand plans. One of them is the Rolling Thunder Pussy Revue. There's all these women's festivals going on this summer, and we don't think they're as adventurous as they could be. Lilith Fair-right away, by the name, you know they aren't pushing the envelope hard enough.

I'd rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than be rich and famous.

Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.

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

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.

I sincerely believe patriarchy to be at the root of all of our social diseases and feminism, it's antidote, to be a prerequisite to peace on earth. feminism provides an alternative way of thinking and structuring things that focuses on and prioritizes relationships and de-emphasizes hierarchy, separation and domination.

You rhapsodize about beauty, and my eyes glaze. Everything that I love is ugly. I mean really, you would be amazed. Just do me a favor, it's the least that you can do, just don't treat me like I am something that happened to you.

If you don't ask the right question, every answer seems wrong -

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

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.

Too much is how I love you, but too well is how I know you.

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.

I know my mind is made of matter but I need to know exactly what is the matter at it's core? Because my heart is just a muscle and simply put, it's sore.

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

I have something to prove, as long as I know there's something that needs improvement, and you know that everytime I move, I make a woman's movement.

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.

The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women can do... birthing naturally, as most women do around the globe, is a superhuman act. You leave behind the comforts of being human and plunge back into being an animal.

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

Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends. But, there's nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.

[The 'corporate takeover of people's lives'] also accounts for a lot of homogenization of culture. There are fast food restaurants everywhere. Every place tastes the same.

Freedom and democracy, That's the word from Washington every day. Put America to sleep with warm milk and clichés, And people are expendable along the way.

When I look down, I miss all the good stuff And when I look up, I just trip over things.

When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong; they taught me different was wrong.

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

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