Ani DiFranco Quotes

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“If you're not angry, you're just stupid, or you don't care.”

“My country tis of thee,
To take swings at each other on talk-show TV.”

“They put you in your place, and they tell you to behave
But no one can be free until we're all on even grade.”

“I believe in that step of not just making revolutionary music but making it in a way that challenges the system, Especially in this day and age when the tools for producing and distributing are more and more accessible to the average Joe and Josephine. The possibility of emancipation and control and independence is so much greater now.”

“When we patch things up,
They say a job well done.
But when we ask the question why
Where did the rips come from?,
They say we are subversive,
And extreme, of course.
We are just trying to track a problem to its source.”

“I’m going to go ahead and go boldly
Cuz a little bird told me
That jumping is easy
That falling is fun
Right up ‘til you hit the sidewalk
Shivering and stunned.”

“I always wanted to be commander-in-chief of my one-woman army,
But I can envision the mediocrity of my finest hour.”

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

“I think I'm done gunnin to get closer.
To some imagined bliss.
I gotta knuckle down.
And just be ok with this.”

“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 still define myself by the places that I've been.”

“So I walk like I'm on a mission cuz that's the way I groove.
I got more and more to do, I got less and less to prove.
It took me too long to realize that I don't take good pictures
Cuz I have the kind of beauty that moves.”

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

“In any marginalized community, whether people identify themselves or not affects us all.”

“And God help you if you are a phoenix, and you dare to rise up from the ash.
A thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy, while you're just flying past.”

“I used to be a superhero.
No one could touch me, not even myself.
You are like a phone booth that I somehow stumbled into,
And now look at me, I am just like everybody else.”

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

“I don't always feel lucky, but I'm smart enough to try.”

“So my heart finally broke. It was so long bent.
And it broke in three places when it finally went.
It wanted only to say what it meant.
So it suffered every punishment.”