“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“If I’m gonna go down I’m gonna do it with style. You won’t hear me surrender, you won’t hear me confess cause you’ve left me with nothing but I have worked with less.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I do believe that music has an intense power to connect us together, to inspire us to become ourselves.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’d rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than be rich and famous.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“There isn’t much I have to say, that I wouldn’t rather just shut up and do.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends. But, there’s nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.’”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Taking me seriously is a big mistake. I certainly wouldn’t.”
― Ani DiFranco
“People need something or someone to fasten themselves to in order to reassure themselves that they are real.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I don’t care if they eat me alive, I’ve got better things to do then survive.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“It’s great being your own boss, but then, you know, you make your own mistakes, you know, and you own them. You know, so it’s empowering, and it’s also humbling along the way.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’m searching, as we all are, for ways to feel good about myself. Certainly, looking in the mirror doesn’t do it!”
― Ani DiFranco
“My political mission is as acute as ever. For me, in addition to kind of looking at the world and trying to engage in my society politically, having the kid around sort of makes me check in with myself. I think you’re all busy trying to fix the world, but what about yourself?”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I hate it when people don’t recognize the work of women as being universal, or having any import to the world at large, as opposed to men’s work, which is generally tends to be seen as more universal – men’s writing about their own experience tends to be put in a broader context.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Someone’s got to be interested in how I feel, just because I’m here and I’m real.”
― Ani DiFranco
“We have to be able to criticise what we love, to say what we have to say ’cause if your not trying to make something better, than as far as I can tell, you are just in the way.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Men make angry music and it’s called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they’re angry and militant.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don’t think its fair that I’m living for something I can’t even define.”
― Ani DiFranco
“They taught me different was wrong.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.”
― Ani DiFranco
“In order to keep anything cultural, logical, or ideological, you have to reinvent the reality of it.”
― Ani DiFranco
“My songs are just little letters to me.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Taken out of context I must seem so strange.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”
― Ani DiFranco
“If you like it, let it be, and if you don’t please do the same.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.”
― Ani DiFranco
“It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then there’s me.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’ve been a long time coming, and I’ll be a long time gone. You’ve got your whole life to do something, and that’s not very long.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I seriously hate pop music and all things super-commercial.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’ve never had a very closely connected family. 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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’m a little hibernating animal. Anonymity is one of my favorite things. I mean, that’s why I moved to New York when I was like 18, because there, there are just so many people that there’s no one and you’re just lost. You’re completely invisible and I find that very liberating.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I see a lot of connections between folk and punk music just because they’re both subcorporate music – I mean, traditionally.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I really have been enjoying performing more lately than I have in a long time and you know, it’s all about that sort of centered feeling that I have now. You know, thanks to, not just my kid, but her father before her. You know, I have a kind of a grounding through them that I really relish, and I think is also good for my work, you know.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Being a parent has taught me a lot of things already, you know, though it’s only been a year and half, and has made me address parts of myself that I would otherwise live in comfortable denial of, or you know and – you know, for instance, my self-loathing.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist. There is no box marked ‘other.’”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’ve been collecting some more high-end guitars. I have an old Martin D28 from the ’60s, a beautiful, classic Martin that I know I played on ‘Mariachi.’”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’ve been saying the Occupy Movement has got the ball rolling, and now we need to take the fight to the great indoors!”
― Ani DiFranco
“I don’t know if there are artists out there who love their own records. I haven’t met any, and I’m kind of extreme in the other direction, but therein lies the impetus to keep working and keep making new songs and new records.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I’m not one of those people who has an act.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I think I’m a very solitary person. To actually not be anonymous is a bit claustrophobic for me.”
― Ani DiFranco
“The stronger I am in my personal life, the more energy I have to look outward, to address my society.”
― Ani DiFranco
“For me, the stronger ground I have in my personal life, then the more will I have to fight the good fight.”
― Ani DiFranco
“When all you can think of is your own personal problems, you have nothing to give to your society. If you’re trying to figure out where your next meal is coming from, you can’t go march on Washington.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Playing show after show is like my bread and butter.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I think the gay community should get smart and drop the word ‘marriage.’ Do you really need to change every right-wing Christian to make sure you get your equal rights? Eyes on the prize, we should be sticking to getting equal rights.”
― Ani DiFranco
“When I first started writing songs and being very explicit, it was hard, but one of the main things people respond to in my writing is that ‘just say it’ attitude of my songs. There really is nothing personal or private; it’s all universal, if you can just find the courage to be open about your life.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“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.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I had a little bit of resistance to the idea of taking energy away from my work, and the baby comes along and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what happens.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Music has as many roles as people make it.”
― Ani DiFranco
“Having more exposure is kind of a bittersweet thing for me, honestly, because it’s nice to have a little more job security in life now.”
― Ani DiFranco
“It can be very frustrating and very deflating to be constantly defined and described by other people, so I’ve stopped reading anything written about me, and I find it much healthier. I just sort of concentrate on what I do and don’t worry too much about that.”
― Ani DiFranco
“I don’t hate being compared with female musicians. I don’t mind that at all. I have no problem with seeing connections between women’s work.”
― Ani DiFranco
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