Women musicians

"Object to the Hollywood film and you’re an intellectual snob, object to the avant-garde films and you’re a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one must often be a Philistine."

"I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets."

"Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down."

"A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is."

"Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher."

"October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 — the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed — in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. [...] Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?"

"I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

"In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising."

"A woman who taught at Berkeley dropped in on me once and saw a book burning in the fireplace. She pointed at it in terror, and I explained that it was a crummy ghostwritten life of a movie star and that it was an act of sanitation to burn it rather than sending it out into the world which was already clogged with too many copies of it. But she said, "You shouldn’t burn books" and began to cry."

"Before seeing Truffaut's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid — I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity — a poetic comedy that's really funny."

"I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different."

"After one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, "Well I don't see what was so special about that movie." I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?... Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings."

"The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this."

"Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful — our own innocence."

"The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child."

"Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it — not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust."

"Audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at "good taste" of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That’s what they go to burlesque for."

"Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money — and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the "artist’s intentions" you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist."

"People who are just getting "seriously interested" in film always ask a critic, "Why don’t you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?" The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn’t very interesting."

"The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art — the expressive use of techniques — it probably doesn’t have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either."

"Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures."

"And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made — which is more or less implicit."

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."

"Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate."

"Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them."

"When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable."

"The small triumph of The Graduate was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate — which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him."

"The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet — one doesn’t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art."

"The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new."

"One’s moviegoing tastes and habits change — I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live — for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we’re tired of."

"If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true moviegoers — those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers — depress us. Listening to them — and they are often more audible than the sound track — as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share their disaffection, but it’s not enough to keep us interested in cops and robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn’t enough. If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art."

"At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films — the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us — that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?"

"There is a dreadful discrepancy between Michelangelo's works and the words put into the mouth of Charlton Heston, who represents him here, and this picture — which is mostly about a prolonged wrangle between the sculptor and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), who keeps sweeping into the Sistine Chapel and barking, "When will you make an end of it?" — isn't believable for an instant."

"Apparently, Lillian Hellman couldn't shake off the predatory Hubbards after The Little Foxes; she wrote this play about the same family, setting it back 30 years earlier in their dark history. The Hubbards, who are supposed to be rising Southern capitalists, are the greatest collection of ghouls since The Old Dark House of 1932. Hellman must combine witchcraft with stagecraft — who else could keep a plot in motion with lost documents, wills, poisonings, and pistols, and still be considered a social thinker?"

"The happiest screen collaboration of Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton — they're both wonderful — is in this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, "The Vessel of Wrath." It's set on an island in the Pacific, which Maugham calls Baru, and it's concerned with the efforts of the prim missionary (Lanchester) to reform the carnal, ribald beachcomber (Laughton). The situation is the reverse of that in Maugham's Sadie Thompson story, but with a light, comic tone. The Hepburn-Bogart "African Queen" probably took a few notions from it."

"The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie."

"Hilariously florid — sometimes referred to as "Lust in the Dust." This Wagnerian western features Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones as lovers so passionate they kill each other. She's Pearl Chavez, a half-breed wench, and so, by Hollywood convention, uncontrollably sexy, and Peck actually manages to bestir himself enough to play a hunk of egotistical hot stuff — maybe the name Lewt McCanles got to him, or maybe the producer, David O. Selznick, used electric prods. Peck clangs his spurs and leers, while Jones heaves her chest; when they kiss, lightning blazes."

"The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography."

"Charles Laughton is superbly vulgar in this whack at the backside of Victorianism. He makes a great vaudeville turn out of the role of an egocentric scoundrel, the prosperous bootmaker who doesn't want to part with his three marriageable daughters because they are too useful as unpaid labor. As the oldest daughter, the spinster in spite of herself, Brenda de Banzie is so "right" that when she marries her father's best workman and puts belching, drunken old Dad out of business, one feels the good old-fashioned impulse to applaud."

"A filmed play like this doesn't offer the sensual enjoyment that movies can offer, but you don't go to it for that; you go for O'Neill's crude, prosaic virtuosity, which is also pure American poetry, and for the kind of cast that rarely gathers for a stage production. [...] Larry, a self-hating alcoholic, is a weak man and a windbag, but Ryan brings so much understanding to Larry's weakness that the play achieves new dimensions. Ryan becomes O'Neill for us; he has O'Neill's famous "tragic handsomeness" and at the end, when Larry is permanently "iced" — that is, stripped of illusion — we can see that this is the author's fantasy of himself [...] Fredric March interprets Harry Hope with so much quiet tenderness that when Harry regains his illusions and we see March's muscles tone up, we don't know whether to smile for the character or the actor."

"Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually "natural" actress even onstage. This was her first big hit in the movies. Under Frank Capra's direction, she plays a tough "party" girl (euphemism for call girl) who poses for a wealthy young artist (Ralph Graves); he sees in her the spirituality that she attempts to deny. The story is a museum piece of early-talkies sentimentality, but, in a way, that only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism."

"Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker."

"De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible."

"Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands--millions--of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer--he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether."

"One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream."

"De Niro's inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He's Travis Bickle, an outsider who can't find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can't sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted — whores, pimps, transients — he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Martin Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness."

"[T]his film offers a nightmare image: the "Black Rebels," an outlaw motorcycle gang — a leather-jacketed pack who resemble storm troopers — terrorize a town. Their emblem is a death's head and crossed pistons and rods, and Marlon Brando, in his magnetic, soft-eyed youth, is their moody leader. The picture seemed to be frightened of its subject — the young nihilists who say "no" to American blandness and conformity — and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl (Mary Murphy), but the audience savored the possibilities, and this clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status."

"TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for."

"The conglomerate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned they have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people — how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no?"

"In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had — zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. The cool managerial sharks don’t have that; neither do the academics. But the vulgarians also did more than their share of damage, and they’re gone forever anyway. They were part of a different America. They were, more often than not, men who paid only lip service to high ideals, while gouging everyone for profits. The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all."

"People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he’s corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan we can see that Alan Alda is a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together."

"It would be very convincing to say that there’s no hope for movies — that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there’s plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering."

"In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture — turning it into Pop art and camp — had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures — and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars."

"Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)"

"If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too."

"It tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off unassertively — so unassertively that the movie is in danger of being overlooked. (Variety has already dismissed it as something "for a very limited audience.") We're getting to the point where the press assumes that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and warns them off."

"Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 — a whole community saying grace — made me expect the worst."

"What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation."

"Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction."

"If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous."

"It's as if Brian de Palma were saying, "What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?""

"Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor — probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney."

"This is a nature-boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. When Dunbar has become a Sioux named Dances with Wolves, he writes in his journal that he knows for the first time who he really is. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head."

"If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?"

"Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated."

"Earlier generations went to see what was forbidden in life and developed a real excitement about the movies. Today’s rating system keeps kids out of the good ones. I wouldn’t want them to see movies like Natural Born Killers, but my tendency is you’re better off seeing things than not. That glazed indifference kids develop can be worse than over-excitement."

"Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out."

"It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack."

"I still don't look at movies twice. It's funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it's different. People respond so differently to the whole issue of seeing a movie many times. I'm astonished when I talk to really good critics, who know their stuff and will see a film eight or ten or twelve times. I don't see how they can do it without hating the movie. I would."

"For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society."

"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."

"I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon."

"[She] played with drive, aplomb, and sensitivity throughout … this performance will take a place amongst the best performances of my music."

"Exhibited a rare combination of emotional involvement and profound calmness on stage."

"Artistic, with high sensitivity and imagination, Anna-Maria managed the difficult program."

"Anna-Maria Ravnopolska-Dean is flying amazingly headlong to the performance peaks. Overwhelming, incisive images, kaleidoscope of colors, flexible technique."

"Demonstrated mastery of the instrument, deep musical insights and stylistic understanding … extraordinary."

""The talent is passion and intellect" says the famous pianist Heinrich Neuhaus — with this mind we can define the art of the young harpist — Anna-Maria Ravnopolska-Dean."

"[She] is a brilliant harpist … communicates marvelously with the audience."

"Triumphed ...the concert was a rare pleasure."

"We are story gatherers. That's what we humans do."

"The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming."

"In my community, we are taught that leadership qualities include humility, compassion, a sense of fairness, the ability to listen, preparation and carry-through, a love for the people, and a strong spiritual center that begins with a connection to Earth."

"When she broke on Earth, the light in her was not broken. We cannot break light, nor can we destroy it."

"Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible."

"The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen."

"It was all connected, this poetics of listening, word making, and dancing. There was power to transform, to lighten the heaviness of the burden of being human. That's how I came to understand the power of poetry and music. It was a tool, but more than a tool. Words and music evoked a state of mind that lifted us up when racial and historical despair threatened."

"Emerging from a story, a poem, the Earth, a time in history, or from the body of our mothers is sometimes explosive, chaotic, frightening, yet always awe-inspiring and humbling. We can use the energy to create fresh structures, or we can destroy or be destroyed. The energy can have power over us or empower us, and even what is destructive might clear the debris so that fresh life can emerge from embers or ashes."

"We must take care to feed the minds, hearts, and spirits of those coming up behind us--to offer songs, poems, and stories that will break open that which is hardened, expose that which is evil-minded or would harm, and remind us how we are constructed to bring forth beauty of thought and beingness."

"Even a lost place within yourself is a place, albeit liminal, a kind of border town. You can make a temporary home if you need to from found materials and shreds of forgotten dreams, and you can even dress to appear somewhat ordinary as you run away, a refugee from yourself. I rolled up the map of my known world and set it aside for some kind of strange autonomy. (Part Four: Diamond Light, p187)"

"Our physical living is held together by plant sacrifice. We eat, wear, and are sheltered by plants and plant material. Nearly all of our medicines are plant-derived. We need to take time with them, get to know them. (Part Six: Sunset, p287)"

"You were born of a generation that promised to help remember. (p23)"

"A family is essentially a field of stories, each intricately connected. Death does not sever the connection; rather, the story expands as it continues unwinding inter-dimensionally. (p30)"

"We are all here to serve each other. At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge. (p32)"

"In the short-root mind, a kind of mind of a people whose children don't even know the names of their great-grandparents, there is no past. Everything is right now. This kind of mind has its roots in the material culture, in what can be accumulated. My great-grandfather reminds me that we need to keep within the long-rooted mind. Because of the longer roots we have a larger structure of knowing from which to take on understanding. (p78)"

"I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories. (North, p91)"

"When Sun leaves at dusk, it makes a doorway. We have access to ancestors, to eternity. Breathe out. Ask for forgiveness. Let all hurts and failures go. Let them go. (p171)"

"European and American settlers soon took over the lands that were established for settlement of eastern tribes in what became known as Indian Territory. The Christian god gave them authority. Yet everyone wanted the same thing: land, peace, a place to make a home, cook, fall in love, make children and music. (p19)"

"Every soul has a distinct song. (p19)"

"In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol. (p23)"

"Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires (p25)"

"A story matrix connects all of us. (p28)"

"...I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul. (p135)"

"I believe that if you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned. (p135)"

"No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. This legacy either will give those who follow us joy on their road or will give them sorrow. (p149)"

"In the American mainstream imagination, warriors were always male and military, and when they were Indian warriors they were usually Plains Indian males with headdresses. What of contemporary warriors? And what of the wives, mothers, and daughters whose small daily acts of sacrifice and bravery were usually unrecognized or unrewarded? These acts were just as crucial to the safety and well-being of the people...For the true warriors of the world, fighting is the last resort to solving a conflict. Every effort is made to avoid bloodshed. (p150)"

"These fathers, boyfriends, and husbands were all men we loved, and were worthy of love. As peoples we had been broken. We were still in the bloody aftermath of a violent takeover of our lands. Within a few generations we had gone from being nearly one hundred percent of the population of this continent to less than one-half of one percent. (p158)"

"There are many of us and we're not just poets. We're teachers. We're dancers. Essentially, we're human beings. And you would think that at this time we would not have to say that. But we still are in the position, strangely enough, that we still have to remind people and the public that: We're still here, we're still active. We have active, living cultures and we are human beings and we write poetry. (2020)"

"We talk about needing food, clothing and shelter, but ... that's bodily. But we also need to feed our spirits, and we need to feed our souls, and maybe we even feed history and grow it one way or the other. (2020)"

"I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear."

"I've come to realize that what has motivated my art-making is really a strong need for justice, for "people" to be treated [with respect.] And then when I say people, I also mean animals and insects and the birds and the earth and the earth person that we are all part of — that there's a key element and that's respect. And my work has always been motivated by that need for respect."

"President Andrew Jackson went against Congress to remove Southeastern Native peoples from the lands there into Indian territory, or what became known as Oklahoma. Of course, we did not go willingly. There were several scuffles and fights and even massacres against this illegal removal. But we were force-marched from our homelands. I think a lot of America thinks it was only the Cherokee — or the so-called "five civilized tribes," that included the Muscogee (Creek) — but these kind of removals or forced migration or marches happened all over the country."

"I think a lot of America, when they think back in history and see Natives, we were hiding out in the woods, wearing rags and so on, but we had huge societies. I have a great, great, great uncle who had the largest horse-racing establishment on the Eastern Seaboard, a Muscogee (Creek) man and half Irish. And they wanted that, they wanted what we had."

"I remember at one point going out to do a story, just after the [1979] Church Rock uranium spill, and there were children out playing in the water and in the livestock and the Navajo speakers were saying, "We need a word." How do we come up with a word that will tell the people that even though you can't see it, there is something dangerous here that can harm you and you can't use these waters, when it was the only source of water for their livestock?"

"when I went to first grade, when we started to learn how to read, I was so thrilled about what happened with symbols and that suddenly it opened up a world to me. I read all of the books in the first grade classroom and was sent into the second grade, and it became like a hunger for me. I liked the sounds, of course, I like the sound that words make. I like the percussion, the percussive elements and the images and so on. Just like the same kind of thing I heard in my mother's song-making. But the more I read and the more the ability grew, the deeper I could read, the more stories and I could be transported in — much the same way that I could be in that kind of visionary dream world when I was younger. And when we get to about 7 — and I think this happens to a lot of us — we forsake those realms of knowing and understanding, and reading helped give that back."

"I’ll be in a car or a bus or a van or whatever, looking at the houses and the windows and all the storefronts, and thinking about all the different realms, all the different story realms, and how many — every place, every window, every doorway is an opening to a life — a whole different life, a whole series of stories. And it’s multiplied hundreds and thousands of times. And some don’t overlap at all. Some are in their very private universes; other universes are more expansive."

"I’m a great-grandmother now. I was a grandmother in my 30s and a teenage mother. And what that’s given me is a kind of a broader sense of the story field."

"we don’t live in a society, generally, that supports dreams as knowledge. And we’re not living in a place like that."

"think about it — about half of our lives, we’re out gathering information that we may not bring forth consciously, and for some of us, it’s like it’s a library that we go to when we need to know something. It works in that way."

"what happens in this country is that Natives are — our stories, our presence has basically been disappeared from the American story because if it’s true — if it’s true that we’re still here, and if it’s true that what did happen was, you know, was grand theft and massacre — then there’s something inherently broken with the story that needs to be repaired. The other thing, too, is that we are here. And yet, people expect us to be in our traditional outfits, if we’re recognized. They don’t recognize us unless we’re mascots or we’re wearing our traditional outfits."

"I’ve been around Natives all over the — all over the world, but there’s something about Oklahoma Natives, you know, something about a Southern kind of openness, which makes more holes for laughter to go through, or for the ironic to live."

"It’s important that, I think, that everyone realizes that they have a connection with the natural world; it’s not something that just belongs to the Indigenous peoples. We might be closer, because we’ve been here longer, to particular elements of it, but, you know, this is something that is inherently part of the legacy of human beings."

"it was that discipline of art which gave — you know, visioning is one way that — and the ability to vision and having tools for visioning — helps any of us out of almost impossible situations."

"Our class and our generation really shifted Native art, in the contemporary world art scene."

"I think of poetry as a kind of lyricism. I think of poetry as a place beyond words, that we — you know, the paradox is, we use words to get there."

"A poem can be like a pocket that can hold anything, almost anything. You can hold different kinds of time. It can hold grief, it can hold history, and it is often — a poem has come to me or through me, and it’s taught me what I needed to know."

"when you’re writing, and I think when you’re creating, too, it’s a large part of that act of writing or — whether it’s music or stories or poetry or drawing, or any of the — it’s — a large part of it is listening."

"Poetry and living — they’re often the same thing."

"I would think that everyone wants a place for their children to live, and to live peaceably, but why aren’t we included in — as human? You know, we’re still being excluded, and we’re still — it’s still there. Those same people that moved us are still there. The same people that signed off and drove us and forced us out of the South, into the — Tulsa, they’re still there."

"I have grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and children, and in the original teachings, we’re told that they’re all our children. And how can I — I have to think of them, and they’re the rudder of hope. I mean, that’s where we’re going, with them."

"Everything is about — I think even — all the teachings, ultimately, wind up — the stories, everything — wind up at a point of harmony. And when you wind up at that point, everything will be reckoned with."

"A lot of images [of Native Americans] are based on fairy tales or Wild West shows. We are human beings, not just people who have been created for people’s fantasy worlds. There’s not just one Native American. We’re diverse by community, by land, by language, by culture. In fact, we go by our tribal names, and there are 573 tribal nations."

"It’s about learning to listen, much like in music. You can train your ears to history. You can train your ears to the earth. You can train your ears to the wind. It’s important to listen and then to study the world, like astronomy or geology or the names of birds. A lot of poets can be semihistorians. Poetry is very mathematical. There’s a lot in the theoretical parts that is similar. Quantum physicists remind me of mystics. They are aware of what happens in timelessness, though they speak of it through theories and equations."

"I can remind people that they use poetry, go to poetry, frequently, and may not even know they are. A lot of song lyrics are poetry. They go to poetry for a transformational moment, to speak when there are no words to speak."

"I always play or perform music with my poetry. When poetry came into the world, it did not arrive by itself, but it came with music and dance."

"Audiences for poetry are growing because of the turmoil in our country–political shifts, climate shifts. When there’s uncertainty, when you’re looking for meaning beyond this world–that takes people to poetry. We need something to counter the hate speech, the divisiveness, and it’s possible with poetry."

"Every poem has so many poetry ancestors. How can we construct a poetry ancestor map of America that would include and start off with poetry of indigenous nations? Those strands would continue into the present with the wonderful young Native poets we have right now. I guess what strikes me is the diversity—the diversity of Native poetry, which was here and is here and is still growing, and the diversity of American poetry, which has roots all over the world—and I’ve always wanted to show that, ultimately, there’s a root system that’s connected all over the Americas, which is one body and all over the world. A healthy ecosystem is a system of diversity. That’s the same thing in poetry, different poetry streams. It’s the same thing with peoples in a country."

"America has always been multicultural, before the term became ubiquitous, before colonization, and it will be after."

"We must know the mythic structures that define us."

"There were no Native names in the American book of poetry when I began writing poetry, though there are many."

"Each of us is descended from poetry ancestors. It’s the same for any art, any occupation. There is a lineage of style, knowledge and culture passed from generation to generation, one artist to another. Ultimately all poetry is related in the family tree of poetry…"

"Poetry is the art that is closest to music, standing between music and narrative orality (which can be speechmaking, sermon or theater). Poetry is the voice of what can’t be spoken, the mode of truth-telling when meaning needs to rise above or skim below everyday language in shapes not discernible by the ordinary mind. It trumps the rhetoric of politicians. Poetry is prophetic by nature and not bound by time. Because of these qualities poetry carries grief, heartache, ecstasy, celebration, despair, or searing truth more directly than any other literary art form. It is ceremonial in nature. Poetry is a tool for disruption and creation and is necessary for generations of humans to know who they are and who they are becoming in the wave map of history. Without poetry, we lose our way."

"We're all putting energy out whatever we're doing... we're in a constant stream of energy, and we're either singing or making noise. (2009)"

"We are all born within a familial stream of connection. It grows us and in turn we feed it. We live in give and take. That's basic human law, and many indigenous cultures still consciously practice it. (2009)"

"Children are considered the continuance of life. They are spirits who have come to share the world with us. We have a responsibility to nurture their gifts, to teach them. A ceremony or gathering cements the relationship and responsibilities. The over-culture has infantilized children and the experience of children. And the over-culture keeps us as children so we do not question consumption and the needs of our souls. (Over-culture is a term I created to name the false culture that traps us economically, whose products do not feed our souls with filling cultural song-story-art food.) (2009)"

"For me, dancing has always meant the ability to move about in the world without question. (2009)"

"(What advice do you have for minority writers who are fighting to be heard or who are struggling for legitimacy in American literature?) Remember that you are born with gifts that need to planted and grown. This "American" culture is young and rootless. It is adolescent with an adolescent sense of time and place that is "here and now," with no reference or power rooted in the earth, ancestors, or historical and mythical sense. Value your community and what that has to offer and continue to reach out beyond what you know to grow fresh ideas, meetings between borders, new roots. (2008)"

"(What thoughts do you have for young and new writers coming up?) Those who write are assisting in constructing the next world, the next consciousness. Be open, aware, and study. Study with all parts of your being, not just your intellect. Some of your knowledge may come from books, most of it from other sources. Always allow yourself to be surprised. And, write. (2008)"

"Yes, we're still struggling to have a place here, though, ironically, we have a place. It's the fearful ones who try and keep us out who are still looking for a place. (2008)"

"Earth is larger than humans in size and consciousness. We're guests on this earth. Humans are just part of a larger creation. If it so happens we were given dominion, or males were-and I don't believe this at all and it's one reason I walked away from the church at thirteen-then we certainly won't have it next time around. We've done nothing but rape the earth of its resources and don't even turn around. We forget to say thank you. (2005)"

"(What do you believe/feel/know lies at the heart of your body of work?) JH: Compassion. Joy. (2003)"

"Really, all poetry is a prayer, you have to go to the center place, inside you, to write poetry. (1994"

"...it is what we are made of, the stories that we carry with us. Stories create us. We create ourselves with stories. Stories that our parents tell us, that our grandparents tell us, or that our great-grandparents told us, stories that reverberate through the web. (1994)"

"In the middle of all the tension and destruction, there is a laughter of absolute sanity that might sound like someone insane. Maybe laughter is the voice of sense. I always tell my students that you cannot take everything too seriously because at will kill you. If you carry bitterness and hatred around, it gives you arthritis, rheumatism, cancer. Certainly, I have to be aware of everything that is happening, but I can't let it kill me. (1994)"

"Alcoholism is an epidemic in native people, and I write about it. I was criticized for bringing it up, because some people want to present a certain image of themselves. But again, it comes back to what I was saying: part of the process of healing is to address what is evil. Evil causes disease, when something isn't settled. The very process of the healing is talking about it and recognizing it. Alcoholism is hiding, it comes out of an inability to speak. (1994)"

"...you pick up the saxophone again, I suppose it's like writing poetry, you are picking up the history of that. Playing saxophone is like honoring a succession of myths. I never thought of this before but: the myth of saxophone and here comes Billie Holiday and there's Coltrane. I love his work dearly, especially "A Love Supreme." That song has fed me. And all of that becomes. When you play you're a part of that, you have to recognize those people. (1993)"

"(In the dedication to In Mad Love and War you affirm that "the erotic belongs in the poetry, as in the self." Can you elaborate?) It has taken me years to divest myself of Christian guilt, the Puritan cloud that provides the base for culture in this country... or at least to recognize the twists and turns of that illogic in my own sensibility. In that framework the body is seen as an evil thing and is separate from spirit. The body and spirit are not separate. Nor is that construct any different in the place from which I write poetry. There is no separation. (1993)"

"I'm already tired of hearing about this madman Columbus and discovery. Yet, this quincentenary is important because crucial attention is being paid to the indigenous peoples of this america. I say there never was an "encounter." To have an encounter would be quite a groundbreaking event! That would require Euro-Americans and Europeans to meet native peoples with respect. I don't know that it's ever been done. There was always a hidden agenda, a hierarchy in which the lives of native peoples were counted as worthless, as were the cultures. What a tremendous loss for everyone! (1992)"

"I truly feel there is a new language coming about-look at the work of Meridel LeSueur, Sharon Doubiago, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker - it's coming from the women. Something has to be turned around. (1990)"

"I want to have some effect in the world; I want my poetry to be useful in a native context as it traditionally has been. In a native context art was not just something beautiful to put up on the wall and look at; it was created in the context of its usefulness for the people. (what do you hope your poems do?) JH: I hope that on some level they can transform hatred into love. Maybe that's being too idealistic; but I know that language is alive and living, so I hope that in some small way my poems can transform hatred into love."

"Poetry has given me a voice, a way to speak, and it has certainly enriched my vision so that I can see more clearly."

"Many people assume that all Indian people lived a long time ago in a certain in a certain way and wore certain clothes, so if you don't look like that now, you're not really Indian people; but all cultures change. In our case, the change has certainly been abrupt and shocking, and we have had to a struggle to maintain the heritage within that terrible upheaval...Maybe all artists now must struggle to understand the connections between the world of heritage and the present world. Those worlds certainly do converge and maybe poems are points of convergence or, in some sense, paintings of that convergence. Maybe the artist has always worked to find those connections, but I think the struggle is especially important in these difficult times when the illusion of separation among peoples has become so clear...*For me the illusion is that we're separate. That's the illusion."

"I think the natural movement of love is an opening, a place that makes connections...You have to be open in that way to write a poem that really works, and I think there's always love involved in the act of creation."

"There's an incredible relationship of guilt between native people and white Americans. It's an odd relationship. Many white Americans think native people have special spiritual knowledge or know certain tricks. Certainly there are some people who are more in touch with those things than others, but we all have prayer. Prayer was not just designated to native people, and there are no special spiritual qualities designated for native people. Of course, at one point we were all tribal people. Europeans were tribal people; all around the world the roots of all human beings were tribal."

"In the beginning when I was writing poetry, a poem had definite limits--I started out knowing definitely what I wanted to begin and end with, or one particular image that I wanted to stay with. Now I feel that my poems have become travels into that other space."

"I don't see time as linear. I don't see things as beginning and ending. A lot of people have a hard time understanding native people and native patience-they wonder why we aren't out marching to accomplish something. There is no question that we have had an incredible history, but I think to understand Indian people and the native mind you have to understand that we experience the world very differently. For us, there is not just this world, there's also a layering of others. Time is not divided by minutes and hours, and of everything has presence and meaning within this landscape of timelessness."

"People often forget that everything they say, everything they do, think, feel, dream, has effect, which to me is being Indian, knowing that. That's part of what I call "being Indian" or "tribal consciousness.""

"I realize writing can help change the world. I'm aware of the power of language which isn't meaningless words.... Sound is an extension of all, and sound is spirit, motion...Everything, anything that anybody says, it does go out and makes change in the world."

"The world is not disconnected or separate but whole. All persons are still their own entity but not separate from everything else-something that I don't think is necessarily just Native American, on this particular continent, or only on this planet. All people are originally tribal, but Europeans seem to feel separated from that, or they've forgotten it. If European people look into their own history, their own people were tribal societies to begin with and they got away from it. That's called "civilization."

"It seems es that the Native American experience has often been bitter. Horrible things have happened over and over. I like to think that bitter experience can be used to move the world, and if we can see that and work toward that instead of killing each other and hurting each other through all the ways that we have done it. (The world, not just Indian people, but the world.) JH: Sure, because we're not separate. We're all in this together. It's a realization I came to after dealing with the whole half-breed question. I realized that I'm not separate from myself either, and neither are Indian people separate from the rest of the world."

"It's like this, living is like a diamond or how they cut really fine stones. There are not just two sides but there are so many and they all make up a whole."

"Political means great movers. To me, you can define political in a number of ways. But I would hope it was in the sense that it does help move and change consciousness in terms of how different peoples and cultures are seen, evolve."

"Joy Harjo is one of the more powerful voices among the second generation of the so-called Native American Renaissance, the movement that arose in the late 1960s with N. Scott Momaday, James Welch]], and Leslie Marmon Silko. Through these works, extraordinarily innovative in content but also in form, these Indian writers for the first time bore witness directly to their native world, interpreting it from within and freeing it from the portrayals by white writers that had been at best ambivalent, if not thoroughly distorted. The arduous, agonizing reconstruction of the tribal past, the dramatic confrontation with white civilization, the existential and artistic itinerary through present-day America, the shady liminal area inhabited by mixed-bloods-such are the major themes of a literary corpus that has now grown to considerable proportions, one that within a span of thirty years has been acclaimed by critics and readers alike for its vitality and its prodigious variety of voices and styles."

"Joy Harjo has always been one of my favorite writers."

"The poems of Joy Harjo incorporate the aspects of identity, "children born, half-breed, blue eyes..." with the vision of spiritual life beneath the daily realities which face Indian women. She writes of earth, of change, and of the psychological genocide that is often so subtle we do not realize it exists. And she writes of the strength it takes to escape that destruction which often becomes destruction of the self."

"(Q: Who, other than yourself, are the important Native American writers?) NSM: Jim Welch...Louise Erdrich. Leslie Silko...Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo are very good poets."

"It is my conviction that currently in the United States, more women than men are writing good and vital poetry, although there are fine male poets. This is our renaissance, our Elizabethan plenty. We have giants like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima and Maxine Kumin, we have rising powers like Joy Harjo and Celia Gilbert and Sharon Olds, and we have dozens and dozens of individual voices sharply flavored and yet of our time, our flesh, our troubles."

"Joy Harjo is one of the real poets of our mixed, fermenting, end-of-century imagination.""

"She's generous in her poetry, opening her sacred spaces and music to all, yet never naive or forgetful about hostility and hatred, as in "Transformations"... This is not forgiveness, turning the cheek. It's a claiming of power, the power of the poetic act, the courage and grace and knowledge it takes to reach, through "the right words, the right meaning” into that place in the other where "the most precious animals leave." It's about "tough belief," no sentimental gesturing. You hear it in the rhythms of Harjo's music, catching it in the bladed outlines of her images."

"When we are promoting a virtue such as respecting equality and the full recognition of everyone`s rights, what a better way to spread the message than through this universal language - music."

"All women of the world, lets normalise being content with how God created us, proudly and loudly so enhancing our beauty is perfectly fine except when it’s to the detriment of our health, be it physically or emotionally."

"To the black woman in particular, your dark skin is very beautiful just as is. Be you, beautifully so. You are wonderfully made."

"I hope Zimbabweans will write and tell our own stories, us musicians, poets, historians, all of us – we need to capture the true story of Zimbabwe and tell that to the world."

"I did these poems in a very ‘open-minded’ effort to find an often silent/silenced voice. There are things we do not ever say. There are things we don’t know how to say. There are things that have never been said."

"Gender imbalance. I was in Norway sometime and the only difference between males and females there is their biological make up. Otherwise they have equal opportunities and the women are just as aggressive as the men. You have a dream you go for it. There are no restrictions, on married women as they get as much support as that they give to their spouses. There are also equal opportunities at university where all sexes are admitted on equal merit. If I were to get a billion, I would like to empower women starting with the very young girls, who need a good education to build a better foundation for their lives."

"Song of Solomon itself was the main inspiration. I read it properly for the first time and fell in love with it immediately. The poetry, the beautiful manner in which love and its complexities are expressed, and the mere belief in love that it’s based on, were all very inspirational to me"

"And so I found myself imagining such love and how beautifully we could all use the book’s words as a template for how to love"

"There is a lovely story there. I believe this book was given to me as a very special gift because I wrote it in one sitting, in one day. It was a literal natural flow from my head to paper"

"May we all see the value in investing in love and our other halves; being respectful of love by holding it in high and sacred reverence; treasuring it, protecting it, and nurturing it"

"It also has to do with how you package your act, and I believe from day one the audience liked it, so the reception was good"

"And that always put me under a lot of pressure to do much better every time when I am on stage"

"It’s not bad being a backing vocalist, but it takes a lot of commitment to lead a band, hard work and the will to reach the greatness"

"We have quite a number of female musicians that have led bands in the country and sometimes it’s better to make a date with them and share their experiences"

"But some may have stopped singing for one or two reasons but like any other sectors it needs commitment and the will to reach the sky"

"Quite a lot of female musicians are talented and can write and sing their own songs, but some usually want to do so after fall­out with their employers. That is like using more emotions than your talent"

"We are a mere reflection of the society and the only difference is we are always on the spotlight and what we do comes out more than what any other ordinary person does"

"If you say female musicians are drunkards, society is full of drunkards. But that perception in my view is changing"

"Hope Masike is a Zimbabwean vocalist, mbira player, percussionist, songwriter, fashion designer, painter and dancer. She is known as The Princess of Mbira and her music has its roots both in traditional and modern African culture. She is also the lead singer for transnational band Monoswezi."

"One of its most talented and famous performers and teachers is Hope Masike, a 35-year-old woman from Harare, the country’s capital. Born into a large family of eight children, Hope devoted herself to studying the culture of her people, diving into a wide range of subjects from anthropology and ethnology to jurisprudence, never losing the love for her roots and the dream of an emancipated and peaceful Africa."

"Hope speaks out about the issues of womanhood in the rapidly changing Zimbabwean culture."

"By her own admission in the author’s note, the poems are designed to affirm, to confront the silence we so often feel comfortable with and to give voice to those things that have remained unspoken."

"“I was privileged to be the Production Manager/ FOH Engineer for Jesus House Chicago's (RCCG) 2011 Worship Concert that featured Midnight Crew & Sonnie Badu”."

"I wrote my first song when I was 7"

"“Yeah. You know I was always drawn to the music. When I got into secondary school, which was my first opportunity to be able to make my own choices, I joined the choir at Queens College, and it was such a wonderful experience. I just carried on from there; it was a step after the other: taking solos, enjoying the whole scenario, and by the time I got to university, I was fortunate to be a part of a wonderful girl-(musical) group that enjoyed so much success on the Nigerian scene, Kush, and that was an amazing experience. And…you know…it just kept going from there until it got to a point where there was no turning back”."

"“You see because doing music was not about making it, those were not the considerations for me. It was about: oh my goodness, this is such a huge price, and am I ready to pay this price?”"

"With any form of art...authenticity is crucial to success."

"Pray it, i believe it and then worked towards the goal of success as though it was my only reality."

"It’s just part of what I believe. I grew up believing that music is a responsibility and you kinda change lives with what you do"

"I was a bit upset about the KUSH break-up."

"“It’s a very rewarding experience to put songs out there that actually go on to impact people’s lives positively.” [9] Sharing her experience on what it feels like to be a gospel Artist."

"I strongly believe that we all have a part to contribute to making the world better. I’m committed to using my platform and resources to help provide the much-needed health care, facilities, and education especially for our African children and people living with disabilities so they are equipped to live comfortably and compete on a global level."

"I really think I have to find a partner that compliments me but still pushes me and is better at some things than I am, so they can inspire me to improve myself as a person."

"So many guys don’t want me, they want my dad. I dated a guy, and he was like; when is he going to meet my dad. I want someone to love the shit out of me and like to be happy and not my dad."

""I’m excited not only to play music but showcase the vast array of talented artists cultivating the music scene on the continent.”"

"So Neo-Afrobeats is basically a fusion of Afrobeats with different elements. So it can be Hip Hop, it can be House, it can be Pop."

"Africa is endowed with an array of diverse talents and creatives that are excellent in their fields. Music lovers from all over the world have begun to see how phenomenal Afrobeat is and have been captivated by our unique sound. There’s been a spin and the spotlight is on us now."

"I’ve had quite a number of career highlights for which I feel truly blessed that my hard work has met with success. I’m so proud of my African heritage and always have a sense of fulfillment when I’m given the opportunity to serve."

""The show represents a journey from West to East and North to South, but importantly a narrative of Africa then to Africa now.”"

"100 per cent. London was the focal point for me, going to university in London allowed me to fall even more in love with nightlife and allowed me to create a space that was kind of transatlantic."

"Covid-19 definitely threw a wrench in plans made for 2020. Nobody envisaged a pandemic of this magnitude when setting goals for the year. The need to limit all forms of physical contact has definitely shifted the perspective. We’ve had to adjust to the current reality and shift solely to virtual gatherings."

"I’ve grown from being a young girl with dreams to a woman with a global vision. My talent is a platform for more things to come and everyday the Cuppy mission gets even bigger. I have the most supportive fans, friends and family rooting for me and I’m very determined not to let them down. Their love spurs me on and motivates me to keep pushing no matter how rough or tough things get."

"I was like 15, 16 and I walked into a club in Lagos, underaged, and I fell in love with the fact that the DJ had so much power."

"With dating you have to be open-minded; I actually enjoy dating. When you go on a date, it is about talking and getting to know each other. I am ‘super open’, I want to be dating and that is why I met the bus driver."

"Well, Cuppy comes from cupcakes. I was obsessed with baking when I was younger and let’s just say, I had cheeks like cupcakes. I was really cheerful and I just loved anything sugary so people used to call me cupcake."

"So I feel like I’m a bit of a, you know, oxymoron in my environment, I feel like I’m a contradiction. And so for me, it was about finding a name that represented me going against the grain."

"Inspiration behind the Original Copy debut album (20 November 2020)"

"Best believe Tobi IS going to school and the @CuppyFoundation will provide EVERY she needs until she graduates!"

"https://pmnewsnigeria.com/2025/05/04/dj-cuppy-betrayed-they-used-me-to-get-to-my-dad/ PMnewsnigeria"

"The best feeling in the world is having someone all to yourself and not looking dumb"

"No shame in my game."

"You gotta let me be me. Because everything I’m doing and how I operated has worked for me all this time."

"Every day something special has happened. Every day something new keeps happening. It’s crazy."

"People try to go tell you stuff, and they’re not in your shoes. They don’t see all the footwork that goes into it. Mentally and physically, it’s just a drain. They don’t know what you’ve been through, so people always try to tell you “You know what I would do? I would do that.” You don’t even know the half."

"I think the way that you dress always can add spice to whatever you’re doing, to hold people’s attention."

"But the people who do show love and who love what I do, those are the people who I work for, who I want to keep happy. You can’t worry about the haters."

"So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian."

"To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking. I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it's not really about women conductors, is it?"

"There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels antiwoman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before."

"[On the slow growth of the number of female conductors] With women, historically, it's been, you know, "You should be happy for what you have. Don’t push people — they’ve done a lot already!" There’s always this sort of patronising approach."

"We could have been programming work by under-represented people for the last 50 years, but the choice was not to. We could have had women on the podium, but the choice was not to."

"[On a perceived orchestra's retreat to conservative stances after the pandemic] I thought classical music institutions would come back with a new approach, new ways of connecting with audiences. Have we seen that? In some ways I see these organisations trying to go back to the way they used to do it. I'm not saying that what we do — the actual music-making — needs to drastically change, but everything around it does. And it can’t just be, ‘Oh we’re going to include a piece by a woman composer, or a person of colour’. It becomes perfunctory rather than celebratory."

"But, fundamentally, I think goodness is very underrated."

"I believe that we all have a journey of self-discovery that we must go through, and my music reflects this journey."

"I believe that music has the power to heal, inspire, and uplift people, and I want my music to do just that."

"With hard work and perseverance, it is possible to achieve success and make a positive impact on the industry and the world at large."

"Music can also be used to inspire and empower women and girls and to challenge societal norms and stereotypes about gender roles and expectations. Songs that celebrate the strength and resilience of women...are aimed at being incredibly empowering for women and girls who may be struggling with their own self-esteem or facing discrimination and inequality."

"Representation and diversity are crucial in the music industry. When we see artists from diverse backgrounds and with diverse perspectives, it inspires us to think outside of our own experiences and to see the world from new angles."

"“I tend to use my dance moves to translate the music, so you’re going to see what the song says even if you don’t understand it,”"

"“This makes me feel the way I’ve always thought my purpose would make me feel,” she says. “It made me feel whole""

"“My mom has always been just like, ‘Do it but have a real backup plan.’ Initially, when my life changed, they didn't really understand it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a good video, okay. Yay. What does that mean?” Uncle Waffles told BET.com during a recent interview. “Now they’re definitely people who actually encourage parents to let their kids pursue things creatively.”"

"There's no separation, where you come from, whether you're Ghanaian, whether you're Jamaican, whether you're Haitian, we're all one and that's what I wanted to portray on my album."

"I always say my motivation came from the unknown, from having the space, being given the opportunity to explore a different country, a different language and having peaceful surroundings."

"Wake up Africa, wake up and stop blaming / Open your eyes, eyes, stand up and rise!"

"Making collaboration with me? Yes, why not! If you got the interest, you like me and I like you, then we are good."

"My music gave me strength and motivation. And it almost seemed like it was not really my words; it was almost like a voice that was outside of me, motivating me. I said to myself that I like what I do."

"The word ‘Supreme’ is just everything; it encompasses all our emotions, all sides of our being. And, for me, I seem like there is so much that has been said before, and so much I had said in the past, and I just felt like if I am going to say anything now, I have to go within. Going within doesn’t necessarily mean superficially going within my ego; it means going within the body to remember whom I am. And when I do that, the world remembers who they are, because we are all connected."

"I see myself as a smaller version of the universe. And everything that is within me is within this universe. And I am a reflection of you and vice versa."

"You want to change something about corruption, then don’t be corrupt."

"If something is meant to move, it will move. Energy goes where attention is. When your attention is on beyond the sky and stars, then that is where your energy is going to flow."

"Love yourself, Nneka; because only so can you truly love God and others.’ I would say, ‘it is okay to go through certain things. It is okay to have had a difficult life experience. It doesn’t define who you are. It is a life experience. It is there, but it is not who you are. And it is okay to be afraid, but bear in mind that most of the fear you have is what they told you to be afraid of. It is the conditioning. Most of it is not real."

""I believe as an individual, I have a social responsibility to make a difference any way I can"."

"We have serious issues in this country but at the end of the day we only have ourselves to blame."

"Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out."

"Dear Artiste, Management is a bit like a marriage. Your career can be significantly affected by who you choose to manage it."

"Salemina is so English! I can’t think how she manages. She is, in fact, more than English; she is British."

"Nothing .. can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, " The French are a gay and polite people, fond of dancing and light wines."

"Aunt Celia is one of those persons who are born to command, and when they are thrown in contact with those who are born to be commanded all goes as merry as a marriage bell ; otherwise not."

"When you have wanted something very much, and didn’t know whether you would ever get it or not, and then all at once you find you have it, you almost wish it hadn’t come so soon!"

"Lord, I do not ask that Thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest."

""She has a nice ladylike appearance, but when she takes her bonnet off she looks seventy years old.” “She ought to keep it off, then,” returned Francesca, “ for she looked eighty with it on."

"Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.”"

"Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,"

"The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles."

"She was fairly good at any kind of housework not demanding brains. (Chapter 20)"

""Mr. Popham is a Methodist and I'm a Congregationalist, but I say let the children go where they like, so I always take them with me." (Chapter 24)"

"When I was a little girl (I always think that these words, in precisely this juxtaposition, are six of the most charming in the language) -- when I was a little girl, I lived, between the ages of six and sixteen, in a small village in Maine."

"I knew him at once!—the smiling, genial, mobile face, rather highly colored, the brilliant eyes, the watch chain, the red carnation in the button-hole, and the expressive hands, much given to gesture."

"He had his literary weaknesses, Charles Dickens, but they were all dear, big, attractive ones, virtues grown a bit wild and rank. Somehow when you put him -- with his elemental humor, his inexhaustible vitality, his humanity, sympathy, and pity -- beside the Impeccables, he always looms large. Just for the moment, when the heart overpowers reason, he even makes the flawless ones look a little faded and colorless."

"Am simply living my life, am not any of that and I don’t think I need any of it right now."

"My father was a piano teacher, while my mother played the piano: it goes without saying that the passion in me was born very early and that my parents have always supported me, advising me to play the classical piano while I was singing. I lived my life with everyone singing around me – whatever passion I had, my family always supported me. If this doesn't happen, you unfortunately start with one point less."

"When I was ten I was very sure of myself; once a year I skied and on that occasion I was always convinced that I would win all the competitions and in fact I did. I threw myself into it without fear. Then I moved on to tennis and I started to be more afraid of making mistakes. I got scared and started making more mistakes than I would have if I hadn't had all that paranoia. I started to doubt myself, to have no self-esteem. On some days it's freezing, on others it's below zero. I am very self-critical and I always want to give my best, I think this is the reason. I feel a bit Sexy Magica: I understand it as synonymous with carefreeness. I do what I feel like doing, I'm myself."

"I still don't feel like populate. Of course, walking through the streets of my city there are people who stop and ask me for a photo, it's a beautiful thing."

"In my opinion Amici is not a competition or just a talent show, but a school of life, because a leap like this is only made when human relationships are real, when you are "friends" with a capital "A". At four years old my father Marco asked me what I wanted to do as a hobby. I told him that I wanted to play the piano, which was already played in the family, and to play tennis. My parents immediately allowed me to do both. I consider myself very lucky. Tennis, which I played at a competitive level, was fundamental. It's an individual sport: if you win, you just win, ditto if you lose. On the field I almost eat the ball as much as I want to do it."

"Every day I do new things, I'm very happy to live in this loop. I live tossed around Italy, but I'm very excited. I've been singing since I was little, I've never actually studied. But in the villages there were the first experiences of singing in public. I listen to a lot of different music, I don't listen to rap that much. I mostly listen to pop. I like melodies that are beautiful to sing. I am lucky that I have many trusted people who follow me. I also have my sister who is working with me a little, she has no reason to wrong me, when she tells me something I'm sure she is saying it for my good."

"I am in favor of criticism because I think that even negative criticism helps everyone grow, both as a person and as an artist. For me it's important to know from people who don't like you what the reason is for trying to improve yourself. Among the compliments, however, I am pleased when they tell me that I am genuine and simple. I like that it comes out that I'm not a big person. I feel like the same person as before with a little more awareness. Before I was completely out of this world and now I'm realizing that I can face it. Obviously there are people who like me who support me and, therefore, having this little extra awareness doesn't hurt."

"I learnt a lot in the past two months. In fact I consider this period one of the most important experiences of my life. The protests, the weeks-long sit-in at the ministry, performances staged outside the headquarters every evening... There was great contact with the people, not only those directly involved in the arts scene or art lovers. We found regular people on the street interested in music and art. This will definitely be one of the crucial lessons that I have to take into consideration when looking at the role of the Cairo Opera House in society. Today we have to start thinking about how to reach out to all social strata and all generations."

"No doubt, there were days that one was worried. But we could always 'recharge the batteries' by going to the ministry of culture where the sit-in was staged, by attending or participating in the artistic events held there to hundreds-strong audiences every single night. There was an amazing spirit and shared confidence with people from all walks of life, from children and the young to elderly people."

"On a personal level, I discovered that so many people were ready to dedicate themselves totally to defending the cause they believed in. We were not sure what the shape of the political scene after 30 June will be and I have a special respect for all those who chose to stand up for Egypt's culture even when it could have jeopardised their careers, had events taken a different turn. But as we can all see today – after 30 June – artists and intellectuals, as well as all Egyptians defending their country's identity, are victorious. Now we need to ensure that we should go on enriching our great culture."

"There is a sense of security vacuum in the country, with all the protests and lives lost on an almost daily basis. We must not forget the audience's priority may not be the Ramadan programme at the Opera, especially when that programme in question does not provide interesting, new or artistically pertinent evenings."

"A will and a belief that I will make it. I saw what lay ahead and I made every effort to get there. I also used my haters and naysayers to constantly fuel myself.."

"Bill [Monroe], in some ways, he was very inarticulate about his feelings. In other ways, he was very profound about his feelings. And when you got him into a certain mood where he was being more introspective, he really could be very profound, I felt."

""...A powerful rendering of Les Corps Glorieux... she played with an agility that met the musics coloristic and rhythmic demands."- The New York Times"

"Ms. Archer was the first American woman to play the complete works of Olivier Messiaen for the centennial of the composer's birth in 2008; Time Out New York recognized the Messiaen cycle as "Best of 2008" in classical music and opera."

"Her recordings include her new May 2022 release, Cantius, recorded on the Casavant organ at St. John Cantius R. C. Church, Chicago, IL featuring contemporary Polish composers."

"Ms. Archer's recordings span the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, a festive discography that highlights her musical mastery on grand Romantic instruments as well as Baroque tracker organs."

"Ms. Archer is the founder of Musforum, www.musforum.org an international network for women organists to promote and affirm their work."

"She serves as college organist at Vassar College, director of the music program at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she conducts the Barnard-Columbia Chorus and Chamber Singers and she is a faculty member of Harriman Institute, Columbia University."

"She is artistic director of the artist and young artist recital series at historic Central Synagogue, New York City."

"Et quand divinement ta voix m’enchaine Je vois s’évanouir tout ma peine Et tout ton être chante et vive en moi."

"Some trap lyrics are unspeakable, unlistenable, but we have to try to understand why these young people are saying these things."

"It contains a very important line: 'you die a little in order to live.'"

"It’s hard to start from yourself and say: ‘Well, this is who I am, and this is my path’... Talent alone is not enough. You need character, reliability, humility, and courage."

"Talent? It’s not enough for fame."