Ani DiFranco

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

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

I am not an angry girlBut it seems like I__e got everyone fooledEvery time I say something they find hard to hearThey chalk it up to my anger, and never to their own fear

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

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

Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. You know, it doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define, but there you are, right there, in the meantime.

and half of learning to play is learning what not to playand she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to sayand she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her movesand make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to proveshe crawls out on a limb and begins to build her homeand it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not aloneup up up up up up up points the spire of the steeplebut god's work isn't done by godit's done by people

I am getting nowhere with you and I can't let you go and I cant get through.

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.

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

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.

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.'

Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance.

You can't start with imbalance and end with peace, be that in your own body, in an ecosystem or between a government and its people. What we need to strive for is not perfection, but balance.

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 was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.

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

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