I talk to the audience, look into their eyes. I need them and they need me.
Interpretation
The relationship between a performer and their audience is reciprocal and vital.
In this quote, Janis Joplin emphasizes the interconnectedness between herself as a performer and the audience. She recognizes that her emotional and artistic expression relies on their presence and engagement, while they, in turn, find connection and meaning in her performance. This mutual need highlights the intimacy and importance of shared experiences in the realm of live music and art.
In practice
This quote can be used when discussing the power of live performances at a music workshop.
I gotta go on doin' it the way I see it...I got no choice but to take it like I see it. I'm here to have a party while I'm on this earth...I'm gettin' it now, today. I don't even know where I'm gonna be twenty years from now, so I'm just gonna keep on rockin', cause if I start saving up bits and pieces of me...man, there ain't gonna be nothing left for Janis.
When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.
Like most girls I'm always really self-conscious about do I look fat, if my legs are short, if I'm weird shaped, but when I go on stage, man, it never occurs to me. I think I look beautiful.
I won't quit to become someone's old lady.
Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
You can feel all things at once, so why not wear all things at once?
We all prospect, and don't even know we're doing it. When you start the dating process, you are actually prospecting for the person you want to marry. When you're interviewing employees, you are prospecting for someone who will best fit your needs.
The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth.
I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.
Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.
Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.
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